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H673 



901.9 

History and hope 



71-17354 




EAKPE. 



TTTT 



HISTORY AND HOPE 



CONTRIBUTORS 

Kathleen Bliss, A.K. Brohi 

Pieter Geyl, Jeanne Hersch 

Sidney Hook, Albert Hourani 

Theodor Litt, Richard Lowenthal 

Herbert Liithy, Salvador de Madariaga 

Ehsan Naraghi, Jayaprakash Narayan 

Robert Oppenheimer, Joseph Pieper 

Michael Polanyi, Raja Rao 

Ronald Segal, Michio Takeyama 

and others 



HISTORY 
AND HOPE 

TRADITION, IDEOLOGY, AND CHANGE 
IN MODERN SOCIETY 



Edited by 

K. A. Jelenski 

With a Postscript by 

Michael Polanyi 



Essay Index Reprint Series 



t 



BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS 
FREEPORT, NEW YORK 



Copyright 1962 Congress for Cultural Freedom 
All rights reserved 

Reprinted 1970 by arrangement with Praeger Publishers, Inc. 



INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 

0-8369-1794-4 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER; 

70-117773 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



CONTENTS 
Introduction by K. A. JELENSKI page I 

PART I. Beyond the Ideological Passions? 

Beyond Nihilism MICHAEL POLANYI 17 

Messianism, Nihilism and the Future RICHARD LOWENTHAL 37 

Enlightenment and Radicalism SIDNEY HOOK 59 

Criticism and Discussion 69 

MICHAEL POLANYI, PAUL IGNOTUS , K. A. JELENSKI, FRANCOIS 
FEJTO, HANS KOHN, SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA, PIETER 
GEYL, MICHIO TAKEYAMA, THEODOR LITT 

PART II. Prospects for a New Civility 

A Rehabilitation of Nationalism? HERBERT LUTHY 85 

Revolutionary Nationalism ALBERT HOURANT 101 

Criticism and Discussion 109 

HERBERT LUTHY, ALBERT HOURANI, HANS KOHN, 
WALTHER HOFER, A. K. BROHI, PIETER GEYL, HUGH 
SETON-WATSON, JEANNE HERSCH, CZESLAW MILOSZ, 
EHSAN NARAGHI, ALTIERO SPINELLI, FRANCOIS BONDY, 
THEODOR LITT, FRODE JAKOBSEN, RICHARD LOWENTHAL, 
SIDNEY HOOK 

The Role of Religion in the Pursuit of Freedom 141 

KATHLEEN BLISS 

Christian Values and Freedom JOSEPH PIEPER 145 

Criticism and Discussion 149 

KATHLEEN BLISS, RICHARD HENSMAN, HELMUT GOLL- 
WITZER, JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN, SIDNEY HOOK, INGEMAR 
HEDENIUS, KARL LOEWITH, ENZO BOERI, ROBERT 
OPPENHEIMER, ALEX WEISSBERG, RONALD SEGAL, HUGH 
SETON-WATSON 

V t *v. * I \~*<y~ m 

_ 6 J I / 0*3 * 

tw? t *p,& ^^i fRjrn 



Contents 

Some Philosophical Remarks concerning the Contem- 
porary World JEANNE HERSCH 165 

Critisicm and Discussion 177 

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, SIDNEY HOOK, RAJA RAO, JEANNE 
HERSCH 

A PostScript MICHAEL POLANYI 185 

Biographical Notes 197 

Index 201 



VI 



Introduction 
K. A. JELENSKI 



THE last decade witnessed a growing awareness In Europe 
of the exhaustion of the nineteenth-century ideologies. 
Two chains of events lie behind this important change. 
One is formed by the catastrophes and delusions of the earlier 
two decades, the years between 1930 and 1950, which brought 
about a decline of millenarian doctrines. The other Is connected 
with the rise of the Welfare State, with the modifications of 
capitalism, the matter-of-fact fulfilment of some of the aims 
of socialism, and with a growing realization that the realities of 
industrialism are perhaps a more Important determining factor 
socially than political systems, whatever their Ideological origin. 
The Berlin Conference of 1960, held on the tenth anniversary 
of the foundation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 
brought together more than two hundred scholars, writers and 
intellectuals in discussions on the principal problems of this 
decade, under the central theme of 'Tradition and Change'. 
While other study groups at the Berlin conference were con- 
cerned with the political, sociological and cultural aspects of 
this theme, the seminar directed by Professor Michael Polanyl 
was devoted to the 'Progress of Ideas'. History and Hope con- 
tains the papers presented at this seminar and excerpts from the 
discussion which followed. 

Professor Polanyi's Introductory paper, 'Beyond Nihilism*, 
contains a challenging and hopeful view of the Ideological 
evolution of our time. Polanyl considers the revisionist move- 
ment which manifested itself in Poland and In Hungary from 
1954 onwards, and which culminated in the Polish October of 
1956 and in the Hungarian revolution as an historical landmark 
equal in importance to the French Revolution. Indeed, In 
Polanyi's Interpretation, 'revisionism' is not merely the neo- 
Marxist reaction to Stalinist totalitarianism set in motion by 

1 



K. A. Jelenski 

young Polish and Hungarian Communists, but, in a much 
wider sense, a reflection in the West as well as in the Com- 
munist world of the receding influence of the chiliastic ideolo- 
gies on intellectuals,, and on public opinion in general. 

'Beyond Nihilism' is a study of the rising tide of this 'moral 
inversion' which Polanyi associates with modern ideologies ; of 
its recession ; and of the new landmarks (which are perhaps but 
new forms of old ones), which this recession uncovers. Among 
these landmarks, Polanyi recognizes *a reawakened national 
feeling 9 , *a new alliance between liberalism and religious 
beliefs', and a new lease of life given to the sceptical mood of 
the enlightenment itself. 

There is a genuine possibility by which men may discover an 
avenue which will not lead back into nihilism : 

'Perhaps the present recoil may be stabilized by the upsurge 
of a more clear-sighted political conscience. We might con- 
ceivably achieve a kind of suspended logic, like that which kept 
England and America so happily backward on the road to 
disaster. . . . Civility prevailed in England over religious strife 
and a society was founded which was dynamic and yet united. 
May not Europe repeat this feat? May we not learn from the 
disaster of the last forty years to establish a civic partnership, 
united in its resolve on continuous reforms our dynamism 
restrained by the knowledge that radicalism will throw us back 
into disaster the moment we try to act out its principles lit- 
erally?' 

Polanyi's essay served to guide much of the subsequent 
course of the discussion. His thesis that both Communism and 
Nazism are two forms of modem nihilistic fanaticism which he 
sees as a perverted consequence of the Enlightenment, was criti- 
cized by Richard Lowenthal who insisted on essential differ- 
ences between Marx and his followers on the one hand, and 
Fascists and National Socialists on the other, and by Sidney 
Hook who refused to see in the Enlightenment anything else 
than the origin of modern rationalism. 

Three major themes raised in the ensuing discussion were : 

1. The ideological, social and historical origins of the two 
great 'secular fanaticisms' of our time: Communism and 
Fascism ; their similarities and differences. 

2. The declaration of the end of ideology, and, as evidence : 
the revisionism in Europe, the exhaustion of ideological interest 

2 



Introduction 

in the Western world, the erosion or routinization of ideological 
fervour in post-Stalinist Soviet Russia. 

3. The prospects for a post-authoritarian, non-ideological 
society of the future, for what Polanyi calls 'a new civility': 
Does this envisage a return to a progressive, reformist liberal 
society, with a pragmatic attitude toward public affairs? Or 
does it imply a reaffirmation of pre-Enlightenment values, 
characteristic of traditional societies : national feeling, religious 
belief? 

/. The Secular Fanaticisms of our Time 

Before the Age of Enlightenment, societies did not nourish 
the secular design of transforming society fundamentally or of 
achieving social perfection, while after the Age of Enlightenment 
societies tended to become dynamic, obsessed with the concept 
of progress and change, and intent on achieving the goals of 
perfection 'here and now'. # 

What are the intellectual conditions under which both com- 
munism and fascism have gained power over the minds of men? 
Michael Polanyi has emphasized secularization itself Man's 
attempt to conceive the meaning of life in this world in im- 
manent terms. Richard Lowenthal stressed a different con- 
dition : the emergence of the democratic concept in the broadest 
sense of the word, the idea that the political and social order 
could be no longer regarded as God-given and must derive its 
sanction from the will of the people. "All totalitarian ideologies 
[says Lowenthal] are based on the fiction that the totalitarian 
movement represents the true will of the people, the volonte gene- 
rale in Rousseau's sense.' And he adds: 'The very idea of a 
totalitarian political movement gaining power and then con- 
tinuing to mobilize the masses for the purposes of its regime is 
only conceivable in an age where a democratic legitimation has 
become indispensable for every regime.' 

Lowenthal mentions two other major intellectual conditions 
for the rise of the revolutionary historical myths : the conscious 
experience of historic change and the confidence, engendered 
by the progress of science, in the scientific predictability of the 
natural order, which is then extended to the field of history. 

Thus, secularization, the democratic principle of legitimacy, 
the experience of historic change and the belief in its scientific 
predictability, which are all implicit in the intellectual revolution 

3 



K. A. Jelenski 

of the Age of Enlightenment, form the Indispensable back- 
ground to the totalitarian ideologies of our time. But they also 
form the general intellectual background, since the end of the 
eighteenth century, to the new 'dynamic' societies of today. 

At another seminar organized by the Congress for Cultural 
Freedom at Rheinfelden, near Basle, in 1959, Michael Polanyi 
made a distinction between two kinds of contemporary dynamic 
society : the reformist, progressive society, and the totalitarian 
society : 

6 What opposes these two types of dynamic societies, Is their 
attitude towards human nature, the nature of truth, their ideas 
about human goodness, honesty, etc. Progressive society has no 
reason to distrust these Ideas, since it lets Itself be guided, little 
by little, by their manifestations which it considers as authentic 
factors for the amelioration of society. Totalitarian society Is 
much more Influenced by the union of science as a guide to 
reality with Messianic aims and I think its relation tov/ards 
ideas is fundamentally inverted . . .' 

This statement contains an Implication of the thesis Polanyi 
develops in 'Beyond Nihilism' : 

'I believe [he says] that never In the history of mankind has 
the hunger for brotherhood and righteousness exercised such 
power over the minds of men as today. The past two centuries 
have not been an age of moral weakness, but have, on the con- 
trary, seen outbreaks of a moral fervour which has achieved 
numberless humanitarian reforms and has improved modern 
society beyond the boldest thought of earlier centuries. And I 
believe that it Is this fervour which In our own lifetime has out- 
reached Itself by its inordinate aspirations and thus heaped on 
mankind the disasters that have befallen us ... We have yet to 
discover the proper terms for describing this event. Ethics must 
catch up with the pathological forms of morals due to the mod- 
ern Intensification of morality. We must learn to recognize moral 
excesses.' 

But, even if elements of 'moral inversion' were implicitly 
present in the secular urge towards perfection which first mani- 
fested itself in the Age of Enlightenment, the fact still remains 
that the same intellectual background gave birth to two different 
kinds of modern societies the reformist and the totalitarian. 
Participants of the study-group sought specific causes of the rise 
of totalitarianism : religious, sociological, historical. 

4 



Introduction 

One of the implications of secularization, the transfer of the 
religious urge to problems of this world, was particularly 
stressed. J. L. Talmon, author of The Origins of Totalitarian 
Democracy, thus underlined the c para-religious' character of 
political Messianism at the seminar of Rheinfelden: 'The 
principal characteristic of Messianic thinkers and theoreticians* 
from Rousseau to Marx, passing through Saint-Simon, Fourier 
and others, is that each one of them finds it absolutely necessary 
to begin his research and to continue it through a reglement de 
comptes with religion. They are all entirely, I would say aggres- 
sively, conscious of offering a substitute to religion.' 

Following this line of argument, Richard Lowenthal attaches 
particular importance to the secularization of the religious hope 
of the Millennium : 'There is more than "moral passion" in an 
elaborate system that tells us that mankind started in a state of 
innocence (state of nature, primitive Communism), was cor- 
rupted by ambition and avarice (class society, state, exploita- 
tion) and will eventually enter a realm of perfect justice where 
all sin (oppression, exploitation, rivalry) and conflict will 
disappear and no compulsion will be needed : this is a sacred 
history and a promise of salvation on earth.' We are here faced 
with a modem version of the chiliastic heresies of the Middle 
Ages. Lowenthal goes on to show that Nazi doctrine is just such 
a perverted reflection of miilenarianism : 'The formal structure 
of their vision of history showed the same origin in the tripartite 
apocalyptic scheme as that of their Marxist antipodes, with 
biology replacing economics as the master-key to history, the 
state of innocence identified with racial purity and the fall with 
the bastardization of the fallen race.' But its spiritual model is 
to be found not in chiliastic, but in antinomian and satanistic 
heresies : 'those which sought to escape from the burden of guilt 
and moral conflict in the doctrine that every "sin" was per- 
mitted to the Elect, and that the ability to commit deeds which 
to others v/ere deadly sin without a sense of guilt was the very 
proof of election'. 

Richard Lowenthal also developed in his paper what he 
called the 'dynamic' causes for the rise of totalitarianism, which 
can be described as the collapse of traditional authority in a 
society where rules of conduct are dependent on external 
authority both for their preservation and their gradual adjust- 
ment to changing conditions. 

5 



K. A. Jelenski 

Sidney Hook, however, rejected the entire set of presupposi- 
tions in the arguments of Polanyi and Lowenthal: 'The chief 
causes of the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions have very little to 
do with doctrinal beliefs. They are to be found in the First 
World War and its consequences. Not 1789 but 1914 deserves 
the title of the Year of the Second Fall of Man.' 

A considerable part of the discussion was concerned with 
doing away with a misunderstanding which arose out of Pol- 
anyi's interpretation of Communism and Nazism as two forms 
of moral nihilistic inversion. Certainly the totalitarianism of the 
left and the totalitarianism of the right are two different kinds of 
revolt against the hypocrisy of the old order. And certainly the 
manifestations of both were similarly callous and cruel. But 
while Marx and Ms followers attacked 'bourgeois morality 9 as 
hypocritical, they attacked it from the basis of its own professed 
universal values : of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal-humanist 
tradition. In fact, the revisionist 'revolution' was a reaction 
against a new hypocrisy, undertaken in the defence of values 
which the Communists still professed in doctrine while disre- 
garding them in practice. Fascists and National Socialists, on 
the other hand, start from a similar disgust with the old order, 
but they conclude that these values themselves are false and 
should be replaced by an 'honest' cult of the stronger, the 
ennobling qualities of violence and the rejection of all traditional 
moral restraints in principle. 

Whatever the differences of theory, however, Theodor Litf s 
testimony of his own experiences under Nazism and under 
Communism in Eastern Germany demonstrated the existence 
in both of the same mixture of the rational and the irrational, of 
'exasperated moral passion' and nihilism which Polanyi diag- 
nosed in his paper. 

//. The End of the Ideological Age? 

However much disagreement there was as to their causes, 
there was considerable agreement that evidence of the end of 
ideologies does exist. 

Let us first examine Polish and Hungarian revisionism and 
Polanyi's implication that revisionism is tied to a revival of 
national and religious feeling. 

If by 'revisionism' we understand the voice of the pays reel 

6 



Introduction 

which first expressed itself after years of repression and silence^ 
then Polanyi's contention is right: events in Poland and in 
Hungary showed that nationalism and religion are still strong. 
But if we consider 'revisionism' in its strict terms, if we apply it 
only to the Polish and Hungarian Communist writers, philo- 
sophers, intellectuals who revolted against the discrepancy 
between the professed humanistic values and the inhuman 
totalitarian practice of the regime, then the return to patriotic 
and religious values is far less evident. Polish revisionists re- 
discovered the crucial fact which degraded Marxism into the 
Communist totalitarian ideology this was Lenin's 1902 dogma 
of 'democratic centralism', of the identification of 'the Prole- 
tariat' with 'the Party' which must at all costs preserve total 
power. These revisionists were returning to the ideas of Rosa 
Luxemburg, under whose influence the Polish Communist Party 
had been originally formed, of 'Workers' Democracy' and of 
internationalism. These ideas were overtly stressed in numerous 
essays which appeared in Po Prostu, the magazine of the youth- 
ful Polish revisionists. While they could never say so directly, 
Polish revisionists often implied that Poland's independence 
from the Soviet Union was to be defended not merely on 
'patriotic' grounds, but in order to form a sort of 'bridgehead* 
of new internationalism. 

The attitude of Polish revisionists towards religion had an 
ambiguous character, and does not entirely justify Polanyi's 
claim that 'another revisionist idea lay in the newly-found 
alliance between liberalism and religious beliefs'. Polish re- 
visionists were virulent anticlericals. But they rightly perceived 
that religious persecution had greatly strengthened the position 
of the Catholic Church in Poland. They called for religious 
tolerance not out of any sympathy for religion, but because (a) 
they considered Stalinism the worst form of clericalism and (b) 
they did in fact return to many ideas of the Age of Enlighten- 
ment, and briefly regained faith in the force of reason. But 
Polish revisionists became gradually aware of their inefficacy. 
Their attempt to re-think Communism in genuinely Marxist 
terms, their desire to see how one could bring about a true Com- 
munist society in contrast to the monstrosities of Stalinism, 
were short-lived. Most revisionists became disillusioned and 
sceptical. The majority has probably arrived at what one might 
call approximately 'social democratic' conclusions. Most of 

7 



K. A. Jeknski 

them share the hope, widespread in the West, that the trans- 
formation of the Soviet Union into an industrial society will 
make it possible to arrive at some equivalent of a democratic 
welfare state. A small minority has come to consider that 
traditional values such as the nation or religious beliefs are the 
only effective bulwarks against modern totalitarianism. It may 
be that Polanyi's conclusions apply to this minority only and 
that this minority turned to pragmatic traditionalism after 1957, 
that is as a consequence of the apparent failure of their revi- 
sionist movement. But this may be a problem of vocabulary : 
one can, as in the foregoing, interpret 'revisionism' in the 
narrow sense of the neo-Marxist thought which manifested itself 
in the Communist bloc between 1954 and 1957, and which since 
has been silenced. 

One thing is certain : The Polish and Hungarian revisionists 
refused to sacrifice the present of mankind for a promised 
tomorrow; as a result of their experience with that 'future', 
they did assert the claims of humanism. 

As the foremost Polish revisionist philosopher Leszek Kola- 
kowski put it : 

C I shall never believe that the moral and intellectual life of 
mankind conforms to the laws of economic Investments, that Is, 
that one should expect better results tomorrow by saving today, 
I.e. use lies for the triumph of truth and take advantage of crime 
in order to pave the way for righteousness.' 

The evidence pointing to the end of Ideologies in the West has 
been reduced by most speakers to the visible exhaustion of 
ideological Interest In the post-war Western world, and par- 
ticularly among the young generations. But since we are here 
concerned with ideas and with the intellectuals who have been 
the bearers of Ideologies, the existence of small revisionist 
groups in the West may be relevant. Like Po Prostu or the 
Irodalmi Ujsag of 1956 in Poland and Hungary, the English 
New Left Review, the French Arguments., the American Dissent 
have obviously abandoned the doctrinaire interpretation of 
orthodox Marxism and have in common a search for a new 
socialist humanism. Surely It Is significant that the most radical 
young intellectuals in the West seem to have lost a Messianic 
faith in the proletariat and do not even strike out with any self- 
assurance against 'the capitalists' or 'the bourgeoisie'. The new 
target of their criticism Is rather the amorphous 'mass society*, 

8 



Introduction 

which they attack In the language of early Marx, particularly in 
terms of alienation. 

Indeed, what may account for the changed temper of even 
the most dissatisfied elements of Western contemporary intelli- 
gentsia, is that their discontent is expressed within the frame- 
work of a highly organized industrial society, in which the terms 
of the class straggle, as laid down by Marx, have lost much of 
their relevance. Western revisionists may refuse to see that the 
socio-economic mutation of the societies in which they live 
can be interpreted in marxist terms as realising some of Marx's 
own hopes, although not along the lines of his prophecies; 
that class division can one day be abolished not through the 
victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, but by both of 
them merging in a 'mass society'. But even if some of them 
continue to reject this interpretation of contemporary changes, 
they no longer believe in a proletarian revolution which will 
bring about the Millennium. The most stubborn Manicheans 
among them now tend to identify themselves with the former 
colonial peoples, who, in their view have inherited revolu- 
tionary dynamics previously attributed to the proletariat. 

What seems certain, however, is that the image of the Millen- 
nium has generally lost its sway and so has the feeling that all 
means are acceptable if in the long run they will bring it about. 
If there is no certitude about what is the ultimate image of the 
new society, pragmatic compromise begins anew to be con- 
sidered as the least of all evils. 

What Karl Popper calls 'piecemeal social engineering', the 
matter-of-fact, immediate problems of standard of living, 
education, etc., does, in fact, function in the West. As Michael 
Polanyi has pointed out in his paper, c the more sober, prag- 
matist attitude towards public affairs which has spread since 
1950 through England and America, Germany and Austria, 
reproduces in its repudiation of ideological strife the attitude of 
Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists towards religious bigotry'. 
But this perspective on society and politics is not exciting for 
intellectuals. 

The young generation in the West has often been described as 
sober, matter-of-fact, having a 'mature' acceptance of politics 
and existence ; but also as having an underlying restlessness, a 
feeling of being cheated out of an adventure, and a search for 
passion. They would probably agree with Max Weber that 'he 

9 



K. A. Jelenski 

who seeks the salvation of souls, his own as well as others, 
should not seek it along the avenue of polities'. But where 
then, if at all, if he must, does contemporary man seek Ms 
'salvation'? The irrational implications of this question may be 
decisive for the prospects of the post-authoritarian, post-ideo- 
logical society evoked in Professor Polanyi's paper. 

Can we speak of 'the end of ideology' in relation to the 
newly-emancipated 'underdeveloped countries', on whose 
evolution, in the long run, the future of our world may depend? 
Michael Polanyi said that the new intellectual movement which 
he connects with the Hungarian Revolution has, in less dramatic 
forms, 'spread all through the area of receding dynamism, 
almost everywhere outside Communist China'. He thinks that 
the 're-awakened national feeling rejuvenated the ancient 
societies of Asia and Africa, creating, along with much wasteful 
strife, new popular communities which transcend the ideological 
conflicts of European dynamism'. 

The exception was stressed by Richard Lowenthal when he 
said 'Chinese Communism achieved total domination of a 
potential Great Power in 1949 after more than twenty years of 
civil war at a time when, in Polanyi's view, the ideological age 
was already on its way out and has shown an unexampled 
ideological virulence in recent years.' 

As for the other rising States of Asia and Africa, it can be 
argued that they are fashioning new ideologies with a specific 
appeal for their own people, industrialization, modernization, 
race, Pan-Arabism and nationalism which have a distant 
relationship to the old nineteenth-century ideologies which 
have become exhausted in the West. This relationship, accord- 
ing to J. L. Talmon (Seminar of Rheinfelden), rests on the fact 
that in Asia and Africa we are confronted with a new form of 
political Messianism. The nineteenth-century European version 
of political Messianism combined two postulates, according to 
Talmon : the desire to combat all alienation, and on the other 
hand the desire for cohesion, for organization. The differences 
of religious, spiritual, intellectual and political traditions in the 
West and in the new States of Asia and Africa lead Talmon to 
question the results of this 'transplantation' of a new form of 
political Messianism to other civilizations: 'Will they not be 
reduced to adopt its organizational aspect only, a sort of instru- 
ment to construct immense power-machines, while abandoning 

10 



Introduction 

its prophetic disquiet, its prophetic mission? In this case, if we 
bear In mind that in the long run nationalistic particularities 
have proved more powerful, infinitely stronger than Messianic 
universalism, could we not fear that in adopting this sort of 
organizational Messianisin, these civilizations, if they really 
neglect the prophetic tradition, may transform Messianism into 
a mere lever to construct instruments of power to extol their 
unique character, their differences, and to reject Western 
civilization, guilty of so much oppression in the past?' 

///. Prospects for a Post-Ideological Society 

Whatever particular objections and doubts were raised by 
some participants of the study-group, the moral and intellectual 
temper of the fifties at least in Europe and North America 
clearly indicates the abatement of nineteenth-century ideologies. 
The importance of Polanyi's challenge consists in the fact that 
he wishes to look beyond and study the next stage of the 
historical process in which we are involved. 

At the Rheinfelden Seminar Polanyi mentioned another 
possible direction in which a post-authoritarian, post-ideolog- 
ical society might move: 'There is absolutely no reason for 
rejecting the eventualities of the replacement of modern fana- 
tical societies, and of the corruption they bring about, by a 
reformist society.' 

'Revisionism' might thus entail a return to a pre-Enlighten- 
ment view of the world (religion, nationalism), in fact to some 
degree to what Polanyi called an 'ancient and static society' 
But it might also entail a return to a conception of a reformist, 
progressive, liberal society which we owe to the Enlightenment. 

Both these prospects were discussed by the study-group. 
Herbert Liithy pointed out the ambiguity of nationalism in 
Polanyi's paper 'once as a fanatic ideology, another time as a 
form of hope'. He went on to warn against the latter approach : 
'In recent years' he says 'Titoism, the East German rising 
of 1953, the Hungarian and Polish revolutions of 1956, the 
Tibetan rising and similar events have led to a kind of rehabili- 
tation of nationalism in Western thought. This is, in the first 
instance, merely an expression of relief at the fact that the Soviet 
system is also having trouble with nationalistic reactions, and of 
the understandable sympathy with every form of reaction to an 

B 11 



K. A. Jelenski 

equally brutal and deceitful despotism. Yet I nevertheless con- 
sider it important that we should not develop a double-minded- 
ness with regard to a pathological phenomenon which, when it 
appears in the West, we regard as a plague, but of which, when it 
breaks out in the Communist Empire, we approve simply 
because it causes disquiet to the Communist rulers behind the 
Iron Curtain.' 

Are we then to count nationalism among those manifestations 
of revisionism which could lead us beyond ideological religions 
towards a peaceful, tolerant and equilibrated society? Liithy 
thinks our answer to this question should take into account two 
series of events : the fight for independence of the ex-colonial 
peoples and the awakening of nationalism in the Communist 
sphere of influence. 

All the participants of the seminar expressed their unequi- 
vocal approval of the new independence movements in Asia and 
Africa. However, to what extent is our knowledge of European 
nationalism of any use in the effort to estimate the exact signi- 
ficance of other, non-European nationalisms? An answer to this 
question is important if we are to take the just measure of the 
vast revolution going on in the greater part of the world today. 

As for the nationalist revival in the Eastern European revolu- 
tions, it was not their aim to establish a specifically Polish or 
Hungarian social order : it was a search for a new form of a just 
and free society. 'That this fight should have taken a nation- 
alistic colour' [says Liithy] 'is understandable, because every 
historic fight is taking place not in a no-man's-land of abstract 
humanity, but in the given framework of state institutions, of 
institutional possibilities inherent in political strife.' The 
demand for autonomy by cultural, religious, or even simply 
regional communities, for individual freedom of thought and 
behaviour permitting individuals as well as historical and social 
groups to breathe and develop freely, is not in essence nation- 
alistic. In Liithy's words: 'If we repudiate nationalism as a 
doctrine, as a principle of integration, this does not mean that 
any particular community has no right to live, but, on the 
contrary, that this right should be fully acknowledged.' Liithy's 
solution to this problem, which was shared by Jeanne Hersch 
and other participants, is a federal and supra-national one: 
'Today the Western world is beginning slowly and unwillingly 
to feel its way towards both pluralistic and supra-national forms 

12 



Introduction 

of organization. There Is as yet no indication of a definite suc- 
cess in this direction. Yet it is my firm conviction that no other 
method has any future, and that retreat would be catastrophic.' 

It is characteristic that none of the contributors to this 
seminar seem to recognize the relevance of ideological and 
political categories of the last century, such as Left and Right, 
liberal and socialist, revolutionary and traditionalist. The con- 
flicts which these categories imply have either become reconciled 
by experience or else so entangled that they can be detected in 
every camp. Didn't Stalin deplore in 1952 his followers' belief 
that the 'objective laws of economies' that is the laws of the 
market could be rendered invalid under socialism? Didn't the 
general acceptance in the West of the Keynesian model render 
the liberal theory of economic self-adjustment invalid? Can one 
describe as 'extreme left' the Soviet regime which identifies 
society with the State? What is the right ideological or political 
term for the new regimes of Asia and Africa which have had 
such an important bearing on the discussion? 

To the new problems which are facing us today on a uni- 
versal scale, a new approach is needed. The Berlin Conference 
was an attempt by philosophers, writers and scholars of four 
continents, united by a common bond of attachment to freedom, 
to find a new approach. 



13 



PARTI 

Beyond the Ideological Passions ? 



Beyond Nihilism 
MICHAEL POLANYI 



WE are told that moral improvement has not kept pace 
with the advance of science, and that the troubles of 
our age are largely due to this disparity. I shall argue 
that this view is false, or at least profoundly misleading. For I 
believe that never in the history of mankind has the hunger for 
brotherhood and righteousness exercised such power over the 
minds of men as today. The past two centuries have not been an 
age of moral weakness, but have, on the contrary, seen the out- 
break of a moral fervour which has achieved numberless human- 
itarian reforms and has improved modern society beyond the 
boldest thoughts of earlier centuries. And I believe that it is this 
fervour which in our own lifetime has outreached itself by its 
inordinate aspirations and thus heaped on mankind the disasters 
that have befallen us. I admit that these disasters were accom- 
panied by moral depravation. But I deny that this justifies us in 
speaking of moral retardation. What sluggish river has ever 
broken the dams which contained it or smashed the wheels 
which harnessed it? We have yet to discover the proper terms 
for describing this event. Ethics must catch up with the patho- 
logical forms of morals due to the modern intensification of 
morality. We must learn to recognize moral excesses. 

I shall suggest that modern nihilism is a moral excess from 
which we are suffering today. And I shall try to look past this 
stage and see whether there is in fact anything beyond it. For 
our passion for nihilistic self-doubt may be incurable, and it may 
come to an end only when it has finally destroyed our civiliza- 
tion. 

To speak of moral passions is something new. The idea that 
morality consists in imposing on ourselves the curb of moral 

commands, is so ingrained in us, that we simply cannot see that 

17 



Michael Polanyi 

the moral need of our time is, on the contrary, to curb our 
inordinate moral demands, which precipitate us into moral 
degradation and threaten us with bodily destruction. 

There is admittedly one ancient record of moral admonitions 
which are outbreaks of moral passions : the sermons of the 
Hebrew prophets. I might have disregarded these since their 
fulminations were fired by religious zeal and the religious zeal 
of Judaeo-Christianity is not primarily moral. But these prophetic 
utterances are relevant here because their Messianism, rein- 
forced by the apocalyptic messages of the New Testament, gave 
rise in the late Middle Ages and after, to a series of chiliastic out- 
bursts in which the inversion of moral passions into nihilism 
made its first appearance. 

This has been followed up recently by Norman Cohn in The 
Pursuit of the Millennium. He shows that the initial impetus to the 
repeated Messianic rebellions, which occurred in Central 
Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries was given by 
the great moral reforms of Gregory VII. His violent resolve to 
purge the Church of simony, to prohibit the marriage of the 
clergy and enforce their chastity retrieved the Church from 
imminent decay, but it did so at the cost of inciting the populace 
to rebellion against the clergy. These rebellions were both 
religious and moral. Their master ideas could be conceived only 
in a Christian society, for they assailed the spiritual rulers of 
society for offending against their own teachings. Rulers who 
did not preach Christian ideals could not be attacked in these 
terms. 1 

Since no society can live up to Christian precepts, any society 
professing Christian precepts must be afflicted by an internal 
contradiction, and when the tension is released by rebellion its 
agents must tend to establish a nihilist Messianic rule. For a 
victorious rising will create a new centre of power, and as the 
rising had been motivated by Christian morality, the new centre 
will be beset by the same contradiction against which its sup- 
porters had risen in rebellion. It will, indeed, be in a worse 
position, for its internal balance will not be protected by any 
customary compromise. It can then hold on only by proclaiming 

1 1 am concerned here only with risings proclaiming moral principles which 
the existing rulers profess, and are accused of failing to observe. This does not 
apply generally to outbursts of millenarism among primitive people. Even so, such 
movements are most frequently induced by the teachings of Christian mission- 
aries. (See Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Sounds, London 1957, p. 245.) 

18 



Beyond Nihilism 

itself to be the absolute good : a Second Coming greater than the 
first and placed therefore beyond good and evil. We see arising 
then the 'moral superman', whom Norman Cohn compares 
with the 'armed bohemians' of our days, the followers of 
Bakunin and Nietzsche. For the first time the excesses of 
Christian morality turned here into fierce immoralism. 

But these events were but scattered prodromal signs. The full 
power of the disturbance which had caused them became mani- 
fest only after the secularization of Europe in the eighteenth 
century. This change was neither sudden nor complete: but 
secularization was broadly completed in half a century. It was 
decisively advanced by the new scientific outlook ; the victory of 
Voltaire over Bossuet was the triumph of Newton, even though 
Newton might not have wanted it. The scientific revolution sup- 
plied the supreme axiom of eighteenth-century rationalism, the 
rejection of all authority ; Nullius in Verba had been the motto of 
the Royal Society at its foundation in 1660. Science served also 
as a major example for emancipating knowledge from religious 
dogma. 

The new world view was expected to set man free to follow 
the natural light of reason, and thus to put an end to religious 
fanaticism and bigotry which were deemed the worst mis- 
fortunes of mankind. Humanity would advance then peacefully 
towards ever higher intellectual, moral, political and economic 
perfection. But already quite early in the development of this 
perspective almost forty years before universal progress was 
first envisaged by Condorcet Rousseau had challenged its 
hopes in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) and Dis- 
course on Inequality (1754). He declared that civilized man was 
morally degenerate, for he lives only outside himself, by the 
good opinion of others. He was a 'hollow man', an 'other 
directed person', to use terms coined two centuries later. 
Rousseau actually attributed this degeneration 'to the progress 
of the human mind', which had produced inequalities and 
consolidated them by the establishment of property. Man's 
original virtue had thus been corrupted and his person enslaved. 
Here is moral fury attacking all that is of good repute : all 
accepted manners, custom and law ; exalting instead a golden 
age which was before good and evil. 

Admittedly, his fervent dedication of the Discourse on In- 
equality to the city of Geneva shows that Rousseau's text was 

19 



Michael Polanyi 

vastly hyperbolic. Yet by Ms argument and rhetoric he poured 
into the channels of rationalism a fierce passion for humanity. 
His thought so widened these channels that they could be 
fraught eventually with all the supreme hopes of Christianity, 
the hopes which rationalism had released from their dogmatic 
framework. But for this infusion of Christian fervour., Voltaire's 
vision of mankind purged of its follies and settling down to 
cultivate its garden might have come true ; and Gibbon's nos- 
talgia for a civilization restored to its antique dispassion might 
have been satisfied. However, the legacy of Christ blighted these 
complacent hopes ; it had other tasks in store for humanity. So 
it came that the philosopher not only failed to establish an age of 
quiet enjoyment, but induced instead a violent tide of secular 
dynamism. And that while this tide was to spread many benefits 
on humanity, nobler than any that the philosophes had ever 
aimed at, it also degenerated in many places into a fanaticism 
fiercer than the religious furies which their teachings had 
appeased. So even before the principles of scientific rationalism 
had been fully formulated, Rousseau had conjured up the 
extrapolation of these principles to the kind of secular fana- 
ticism which was actually to result from them. 

And he went further. Having anticipated the passions of the 
European revolution without himself intending any revolution, 
he anticipated even its sequel which was never intended and 
indeed abhorred by most of those who were to become its 
actual agents. He realized that an aggregate of unbridled indi- 
viduals could form only a totally collectivized political body. 
For such individuals could be governed only by their own wills 
and any governmental will formed and justified by them would 
itself necessarily be unbridled. Such a government could not 
submit to a superior jurisdiction any conflict arising between 
itself and its citizens. 1 This argument is the same which led 
Hobbes to justify an absolutist government on the grounds of 
an unbridled individualism, and the procedure Rousseau sug- 
gested for establishing this absolutism was also the same as 
postulated by Hobbes. It was construed as a free gift of all 
individual wills to the will of the sovereign, under the seal of a 
Social Contract, the sovereign being established in both cases as 
the sole arbiter of the contract between the citizens and itself. 

The congruence between the conclusions derived from an 

1 Rousseau, Contrat Social I, ch. VI. 

20 



Beyond Nihilism 

absolute individualism, both by Hobbes who had set out to 
justify absolutism and Rousseau who hoped to vindicate liberty, 
testifies to the logical cogency of their argument. It suggests that 
when revolutions demanding total individual liberty were to 
lead to the establishment of a coilectivist absolutism,, these 
implications were actually at work in the process. 

Meanwhile this logic was still only on paper, and even on 
paper the tyrannical consequences of Ms position were some- 
times vigorously denied by Rousseau himself. The predominant 
opinion of the Enlightenment certainly opposed both the 
premises and the conclusions of Rousseau, and continued 
confidently to pursue the prospects of free and reasonable men 
in search of individual happiness, under a government to which 
they would grant only enough power to protect the citizens from 
encroachments by their fellow citizens and by foreign enemies. 
The logic of Hobbes and Rousseau was suspended by disregard- 
iag the question as to who would arbitrate between the govern- 
ment and the citizens. Fascinated by the examples of British 
parliamentary government, political philosophy was ready to 
accept the current maxims of British success. It was not Rous- 
seau but Locke, therefore, whose teachings triumphed in the first 
revolution, which was to be American and not French. And it 
was still Locke whose diction prevailed in the Declaration of the 
Rights of Man at the beginning of the French Revolution. 

By that time, however, the secularization of the most active 
minds of Europe and America had advanced nearly to comple- 
tion and the rising stream of Christian aspirations, emerging 
from its shattered dogmatic precincts, was effectively entering 
the field of public life. The French Revolution and the collateral 
movements of reform in all the countries of Europe brought to 
an end a political state common to mankind for a hundred 
thousand years from the beginnings of human society. All dur- 
ing these immemorial ages throughout their myriad tribes and 
numerous civilizations men had accepted existing custom and 
law as the foundation of society. There had been great reform, 
but never before had the deliberate contriving of unlimited 
social improvement been elevated to a dominant principle. The 
French Revolution marks the dividing line between the immense 
expanse of essential static societies and the narrow strip of time 
over which our modern experience of social dynamism had so 
far extended, 

21 



Michael Polanyi 

Little did the great rationalists realize the transformation they 
were engendering. Voltaire wrote that not all the works of 
philosophers would cause even as much strife as the quarrel 
about the length of sleeves to be worn by Franciscan monks had 
excited. He did not suspect that the spirit of St. Francis himself 
would enter into the teachings of the philosophers and set the 
world ablaze with their arguments. And even remoter beyond 
this horizon lay the fact that rationalism, thus inflamed, would 
transform the emotional personality of man. Yet this is what 
followed. Man's consciousness of himself as a sovereign indi- 
vidual evoked that comprehensive movement of thought and 
feeling now known as romanticism. Of this great and fruitful 
germination I shall pick out only the strand which leads on from 
Rousseau's exaltation of uncivilized man who, like Adam and 
Eve before the Fall, has yet no knowledge of good and evil. 
The scorn which Rousseau had poured on all existing society 
presently found vent in Ms defiant assertion of Ms own indi- 
viduality. His Confessions were to show a man in the starkness 
of nature, and that man would be himself, whom no other man 
resembles. His lowest vices would be exposed and thrown as a 
gauntlet at the face of the world. The reader shall judge, wrote 
he, 'whether nature was right in smashing the mould into wMch 
she had cast me'. 

TMs is modern immoralism. Rascals had written their lives 
before and had shamelessly told of their exploits. The wrong- 
doings which a Benvenuto Cellini or a Boswell related in their 
memoirs exceed those of Rousseau, and their authors showed 
no compunction. Yet they were not immoralists. For they did 
not proclaim their vices to the world in order to denounce the 
world's hypocrisy, but merely to tell a good story. 

When Thucydides acknowledged that national interests over- 
rule moral standards in dealings between city states, he declared 
this as a bitter truth. Machiavelli reasserted this teacMng and 
expanded it by authorizing the prince to over-ride all moral 
constraints in consolidating Ms own power. And later, MacMa- 
vellism was to develop into the doctrine of Staatsraison, 
exercising a steady influence on modern rulers and contributing 
greatly to the formation of modern states. TMs Realpolitik 
culminated in the writings, actions and achievements of Frederick 
the Great, but still lacked romantic colour. For it still justified 
itself as a regrettable necessity. 

22 



Beyond Nihilism 

But romantic dynamism transformed this tight-lipped im- 
morality of princes into the exaltation of nationhood as a law 
unto itself. The uniqueness of great nations gave them here the 
right to unlimited development at the expense of their weaker 
neighbours. This national immoralism developed furthest in 
Germany and was upheld there with a strong feeling of its own 
moral superiority over the moralizing statesmen of other 
countries. This German attitude duplicated on the national 
scale Rousseau's flaunting of his uniquely vicious nature against 
a hypocritical society. I shall say more about this later. 

Meanwhile, let me make it clear that I am not concerned with 
the effect of Rousseau's writings on the course of history. Their 
effect was considerable, but even had his works been overlooked, 
the fact would remain that a great thinker anticipated in three 
respects the inherent instability of the rationalist ideal of a sec- 
ular society. He saw that it implied an unrestrained individualism, 
demanding absolute freedom and equality far beyond the limits 
imposed by any existing society. He saw, next, that such 
absolute sovereignty of individual citizens is conceivable 
within society only under a popular government, exercising 
absolute power. And thirdly, he anticipated the ideal of an 
amoral individualism, asserting the rights of a unique creative 
personality against the morality of a discredited society. And 
though the transportation of romantic immoralism on to the 
national scale was admittedly strange to Rousseau's cosmo- 
politan outlook, yet this too was largely prefigured by his 
thought. Now that these implications have proved to be paths of 
history, the fact that they were discerned at a time when no one 
had yet thought of them as lines of action, strongly suggests 
that they were in fact the logical consequences of their ante- 
cedents: i.e. of a sceptical rationalism combined with the 
secularized fervour of Christianity. I do not say that these 
logical consequences were bound to take effect and I shall show 
in fact that they have remained unfulfilled in some important 
areas. But I do suggest that wherever they did come to light 
during the two centuries after Rousseau, they may be regarded 
as a manifestation of a logical process which first ran its course 
in Rousseau's mind. 

I have set the scene and introduced the ideas which were to 
move the past five generations up to the stage which is our own 

23 



Michael Polanyi 

responsibility today. I see the course of these 150 years as the 
rise of moral passions which, though mostly beneficent, some- 
times assumed terrible forms,, culminating in the revolutions of 
the twentieth century. I see the present generation still reeling 
under the blows of these moral excesses, groping its way back to 
the original ideals of the eighteenth century. But since they have 
once collapsed under the weight of their logical implications, 
can they possibly be restored to guide us once more? This is 
now the question. 

I have said that the situation In which the modern mind finds 
itself today has emerged in two stages from the mentality of a 
static society. The first stage was the process of intellectual 
secularization, spreading the new scientific outlook of the 
universe and yet evoking no profound emotions and calling for 
no vast political actions ; the second was the dynamic process 
which released these emotions and actions. At this point the 
thoughts of philosophers were transformed into ideologies. 
Ideologies are fighting creeds. They fought against the defenders 
of the static age and they also fought against each other, as 
rivals. Those who speak today of the end of ideologies, mean 
that dynamism has abated and can move men today therefore 
without commitment to a theoretical fighting creed. 

The effectiveness of dynamic political action, carried on with 
little Ideological guidance Is illustrated by the development of 
Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The aboli- 
tion of slavery, the factory laws, the emancipation of Noncon- 
formists and Catholics, the reform of parliament, the lunacy 
laws, criminal and penal reform, and the many other humani- 
tarian improvements, for which this period was named the Age 
of Reform, were promoted by people of widely different persua- 
sions. The reforms had their early roots in the sustained struggle 
against oppression and social Injustice which had already found 
influential advocates in politics for centuries before the Enlight- 
enment. They were not achieved by a secularized anti-clerical 
movement, but by ancient political forces, quickened by a new 
zeal for social improvement. With his theory of British political 
practice, Montesquieu gave an ideology to France; yet in 
Britain this theory was never an ideology, but a commentary on 
established forms of life. No one objected, for example, to the 
fact that Britain's chief executive was responsible to Parliament 
and that British judges continued to make case-law, although 

24 



Beyond Nihilism 

these proceedings Infringed the theoretical division of powers. 
Such was indeed the fate of all political theory in England : it 
never became more than a set of maxims, subject to interpreta- 
tion by customary practice. The genius of Hobbes was disre- 
garded,, for his teachings were not consonant with practice. 
Locke was exalted and the great gaps of his theory ignored, for 
practice readily filled these gaps. 

Thus Britain avoided the self-destructive implications of the 
Enlightenment of which she was one chief author. Remember 
David Hume's game of backgammon, to which he turned in 
disgust over the consequences of his scepticism it has remained 
the paradigm of British national life. It preserved down to this 
day the movement of eighteenth-century humanism. In America 
the same result was achieved through a passionate veneration 
for the constitution. Hence Britain, whose pioneering scepticism 
was feared by French conservatives in the eighteenth century, 
came in the nineteenth century to be looked upon as old- 
fashioned by the dynamic intelligentsia of the Continent. I have 
mentioned already how the German romantics, who denied the 
relevance of moral standards to the external actions of states, 
indignantly rejected the moralizing talk of English and Ameri- 
can statesmen as stupid or dishonest, or both. But German 
socialists were equally nonplussed by the religious and moral 
exhortations of British labour leaders. Continental Marxists 
kept on discussing the curious backwardness of English and 
American politics even as Communists in Albania today are 
probably wondering how countries like Germany, France and 
England could fall so far behind the enlightened example of 
Albania. 

There was a similar relationship between England and the 
Continent also in respect to romantic individualism. Byron had 
spread the image of the noble romantic immoralist through 
European literature as far as the Russian steppes. The poet 
Lenski in Pushkin's Onegin (1833) has a portrait of Byron in Ms 
remote country house. But England itself got rid of Byron 
without a trace. The problem of evil, the possibility that evil 
may be morally superior to good, which affected all nineteenth- 
century thought on the Continent, was never raised in England. 
Morley, in his book On Compromise, deplores the fact that 
England's civic genius had restrained the adventures of specula- 
tive thought so as to keep them politically innocuous. Had he 

25 



Michael Polanyi 

lived to see our own day, Morley might have felt that England 
had remained backward only on the road to disaster. Or, per- 
haps more positively, he would have seen that England like 
America had effectively relaxed the internal contradictions 
inherent in any Christian or post-Christian society, by gradually 
humanizing society, while strengthening the affection between 
fellow citizens for the sake of which they may forgive mutual 
injustice. Because it was this achievement that has preserved the 
eighteenth-century framework of thought almost intact in these 
countries up to this day. 

However, in 1789, France broke away and led the world 
towards a revolutionary consummation of the contradiction 
inherent in a post-Christian rationalism. The ideology of total 
revolution is a variant of the derivation of absolutism from 
absolute individualism. Its argument is simple and has yet to be 
answered. If society is not a divine institution, it is made by man, 
and man is free to do with society what he likes. There is then no 
excuse for having a bad society, and we must make a good one 
without delay. For this purpose you must take power and you 
can take power over a bad society only by a revolution ; so you 
must go ahead and make a revolution. Moreover, to achieve a 
comprehensive improvement of society you need comprehensive 
powers ; so you must regard all resistance to yourself as high 
treason and must put it down mercilessly. 

This logic is alas familiar to us and we can readily identify its 
more or less complete fulfilment from Robespierre and St. Just 
to Lenin, Bela Kun, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung. But there is a 
progression from Robespierre to his successors which transforms 
Messianic violence from a means to an end into an aim in itself. 
Such is the final position reached by moral passions in their 
modern embodiments, whether in personal nihilism or in totali- 
tarian violence. I shall call this transformation a process of 
moral inversion. 

J. L. Talmon's richly documented account of the ideas which 
moved the French Revolution and later filled the revolutionary 
movements up to about 1848 makes us realize the depth of this 
transformation and supplies already some signs of its begin- 
nings. Here is the language in which Robespierre addressed his 
followers : 

'But it exists, I assure you, pure and sensitive souls ; it exists, that 

sublime and sacred love of humanity, without which a great 

26 



Beyond Nihilism 

revolution Is but a manifest crime that destroys another crime ; 
that selfishness of men not degraded, which finds its celestial 
delight in the calm of a pure conscience and the charming spectacle 
of the public good. You feel it burning at this very moment in your 
souls ; I feel it in my own.' 1 

Yes, it existed, this passion of pure and sensitive souls, this 
sublime and sacred love of humanity and it still exists today, 
only it no longer speaks of itself in these terms. Robespierre's 
text contains some seeds of the more modern terms, when he 
speaks of that selfishness ('egotsme 9 ) which delights in the public 
good. This phrase echoes Helvetius' utilitarianism, which would 
establish the ideals of humanity scientifically, by rooting them in 
man's desire for pleasure. The next step was to reject humani- 
tarian ideals as such ; Bentham contemptuously spoke of natural 
rights and laws of nature as senseless jargon. 'Utility is the 
supreme object/ he wrote, 'which comprehends in itself law, 
virtue, truth and justice.' We have seen that the logic of Ben- 
tham's scientific morality was mercifully suspended and its 
teachings interpreted in support of liberal reforms in England, 
but on the Continent we see henceforth the scientific formula- 
tion of dynamism entering into ever more effective competition 
with its original emotional manifestations. Both were revolu- 
tionary in scope, and the Utopian phantasies of both bordered 
on insanity; but as time went on aE these inordinate hopes 
became increasingly assimilated to teachings claiming the auth- 
ority of science. And the new scientific utopianisrn declared that 
the future society must submit absolutely to its scientific rulers ; 
once politics has been elevated to the rank of a natural science, 
liberty of conscience would disappear. 2 The infallibility of Rous- 
seau's general will was transposed into the unassailable con- 
clusions of a scientific sociology. 

About the same time, personal immoralism that had issued 
from Rousseau, underwent a similar scientific incrustation. It 
resulted in the character first described by Turgenev as a nihilist. 
The line of romantic immoralists which Pushkin had started in 
Russia with the Byronian figure of Oaegin and of Herman (the 

1 J. L. Talmon, The Origin of Totalitarian Democracy, London (1952) p. 68 
(my translation). 

z See F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, Glencoe, Illinois, 
(1952), particularly his study of Comte, p. 138 ff. 

c 27 



Michael Polanyi 

Napoleon-struck hero of the Queen of Spades), was not discon- 
tinued. Raskolnikov develops their problems further, by com- 
mitting a murder only to test the powers of his immorality. The 
figure of Raskolnikov was independently re-created by Nietz- 
sche in his tragic apologia of the Pale Criminal in Zarathustra, 
and this figure, with others akin to it, gained popular influence 
in Germany and France. But not in Russia. The popular ideal of 
the Russian enlightened youth from about 1860 onwards was 
the hard, impersonal scientific nihilist, first embodied in Tur- 
genev's hero, the medical student Bazarov. 

Men of this type were called 'realists', 'progressives', or 
simply 'new men'. They were strict materialists, who combined 
their total denial of genuinely moral ideals with a frenzied hatred 
of society on account of its immorality. Thus they were morally 
dedicated to commit any act of treachery, blackmail or cruelty in 
the service of a programme of universal destruction. On 21 
November, 1869, the nihilist leader Nechaev had his follower, 
the student Ivanov, assassinated in order to strengthen party 
discipline. This is the story which Dostoievsky has told in The 
Possessed, representing Ivanov by Shatov and Nechaev by Piotr 
Stepanovich Verkhovensky. 

The structure of this crime prefigured the murder of his own 
followers by Stalin ; but there was yet some theoretical support 
needed. It was supplied by a new scientific sociology claiming to 
have proved three things: namely (1) that the total destruction 
of the existing society was the only method for achieving any 
essential improvement of society ; (2) that nothing beyond this 
act of violence was required, or even to be considered, since it 
was unscientific to make any plans for the new society, and (3) 
that no moral restraints must be observed in the revolutionary 
seizure of power, since (a) this process was historically inevit- 
able, and so beyond human control and (b) morality, truth, etc., 
were mere epiphenomena of class interests so that the only scien- 
tific meaning of morality, truth, justice, etc., consisted in advan- 
cing those class interests which science had proved to be 
ascendant. Such action would embody all morality, veracity and 
justice, in the only scientifically acceptable sense. 

This scientific sociology was supplied by Marxism-Leninism. 
Though said to transform socialism from Utopia into a science, 
its convincing power was due to the satisfaction it gave to the 
Utopian dreams which it purported to replace. And this proved 

28 



Beyond Nihilism 

sufficient. Any factual objection to the theory was repelled as a 
reactionary attack against socialism, while socialism itself was 
safe from criticism, since any discussion of it had been con- 
demned as unscientific speculation by Marx. Marxism provides 
a perfect ideology for a moral dynamism which could express 
itself only in a naturalistic conception of man ; this is its historic 
function. 

The generous passions of our age could now covertly explode 
inside the engines of a pitiless machinery of violence. The pure 
and sensitive souls to whom Robespierre had appealed still 
existed, and were indeed more numerous than ever, and Ms 
sublime and sacred love of humanity was still burning as ever. 
But these sentiments had become immanent in policies of mani- 
fest immorality. Their accents had become scientifically didactic. 
Listen to an example of Lenin's language in the programmatic 
statement made in June, 1917: 

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a scientific term stating the 
class in question and the particular form of state authority, called 
dictatorship, namely, authority based not on law, not on elections, 
but directly on the armed force of some portion of the population. 

Robespierre's terror had justified itself by its noble aspira- 
tions ; Marx refused such justification and said that violence 
alone must be the aim of a scientific socialism. This is moral 
inversion: a condition in which high moral purpose operates 
only as the hidden force of an openly declared inhumanity. 

In The Possessed, the earlier type of personal inversion is 
embodied in Stavrogin, whom the modern political immoralist 
Verkhovensky is vainly trying to draw into his conspiratorial 
organization. But by the twentieth century the two types become 
convertible into each other throughout Europe. The personally 
immoralist bohemian converts his anti-bourgeois protest readily 
into the social action by welcoming an * armed bohemian' and 
thus supporting absolute violence as the only honest mode of 
political action. The two lines of anti-nomianism meet and 
mingle in French existentialism. Mme de Beauvoir hails the 
Marquis de Sade as a great moralist 1 when Sade declares 
through one of his characters :*...! have destroyed everything 

1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Marquis de Sade, Grove Press, New York, 1953, 
p. 55. *. . . owing to his headstrong sincerity ... he deserves to be hailed as a 
great moralist.' 

29 



Michael Polanyi 

in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure. 51 And 
this triumph over conscience, as she calls it, 2 is interpreted in 
terms of her own Marxism: 6 . . Sade passionately exposes the 
bourgeois hoax which consists in erecting class interests into 
universal (moral) principles.' 3 

I have said before that romanticism recognized the extension 
of national power as a nation's supreme right and duty. This 
political iinmoralism is also a moral inversion, akin to the 
personal immoralism of the romantic school. Meinecke has 
shown that German Realpolitik, the identification of Might and 
Right in international relations, was the ultimate outcome of the 
Hegelian teaching of immanent reason. The strength of 
immanent morality is proved by the violence of manifest immor- 
ality. This, Meinecke thinks, is the grim truth blandly over- 
looked or hypocritically papered over by moralizing statesmen 
and English-speaking people in general He admitted that the 
knowledge of this truth tended to brutalize its holders, but 
thought that the English-speaking people had avoided this de- 
pravation only by turning a blind eye on the disparity between 
their teachings and their actions. He could see no honest way 
out ; and I would agree that there is no way out that is not ex- 
posed to the suspicion of dishonesty. 

A great wave of anti-bourgeois immoralism sweeping through 
the minds of German youth in the inter-war period, formed the 
reservoir from which the SA and SS were recruited. They were 
inspired by the same truculent honesty and passion for moral 
sacrifice which turned the nihilists of Russia, whether romantic 
or scientistic, into the apparatchiks of Stalinism. 

People often speak of Communism or Nazism as a secular 
religion. But not all fanaticism is religious. The passions of the 
total revolution and total wars which have devastated our age 
were not religious but moral. Their morality was inverted and 
became immanent in brute force because a naturalistic view of 
man forced them into this manifestation. Once they are im- 
manent, moral motives no longer speak in their own voice s and 
are no longer accessible to moral arguments ; such is the struc- 
ture of modern nihilistic fanaticism. 

Here then is my diagnosis of the pathological morality of our 
time. What chance is there of remedying this condition? 

The healer's art must rely ultimately on the patient's natural 

1 Ibid., p. 54; a Ibid., p. 54; 8 Ibid., p. 63. 

30 



Beyond Nihilism 

powers for recovery. We have unmistakable evidence of these 
powers in our case. From its origins in the French Revolution 
the great tide of dynamism had been mounting steadily, both 
spreading its benefits and causing its pathological perversions, 
during roughly 150 years ; and then at the very centre of revo- 
lutionary dynamism the tide turned. Pasternak dates the 
change in Russia around 1943. It arose in an upsurge of national 
feeling. Hatred of Stalin gave way to the resolve of conquering 
Hitler in spite of Stalin. Victory was in sight 3 and with this 
prospect came the growing realization that the existing system 
of fanatical hatred, lies and cruelties was in fact pointless. 
Intimations of freedom began to spread. These thoughts repu- 
diated the core of Messianic immoralism and for amoment broke 
with its magic. A process of sobering had set in. In 1948 Tito 
defected from Stalin, invoking truth and national dignity as 
principles superior to party discipline. 

The decline of ideological dynamism set in also on this side 
of the Iron Curtain. In England, in Germany and in Austria, 
the change of heart was noticeable from the early 1950's. Socia- 
lists who, even in notoriously reformist countries like Britain, 
had demanded a complete transformation of society, began to 
re-interpret their principle everywhere in terms of piecemeal 
progress. 

Finally, the events following the death of Stalin (1953) clearly 
revealed that a system based on a total inversion of morality was 
intrinsically unstable. The first act of Stalin's successors was to 
release the thirteen doctors of the Kremlin, who had quite 
recently been sentenced to death on their own confession of 
murderous attempts against the life of Stalin and other mem- 
bers of the government. This action had a shattering effect on 
the Party. A young man who at that time was a fervent sup- 
porter of Stalinism in Hungary described to me how he felt 
when the news came through on the wireless. It was as if the 
motion picture of Ms whole political development had started 
running off backwards. If party-truth was now to be refuted by 
mere bourgeois objectivity, then Stalin's whole fictitious uni- 
verse would presently dissolve and so the loyalty which sus- 
tained this fiction and was in its turn sustained by it would 
be destroyed as well. 

The alarm was justified. For it is clear by now that the new 
masters of the Kremlin had acted as they did* because they 

31 



Michael Polanyi 

believed their position would be safer if they had more of the 
truth on their side and less against them. So deciding, they had 
acknowledged the power of the truth over the Party and the 
existence of an independent ground for opposition against the 
Party. And this independent ground this new Mount Ararat 
laid bare by the receding flood of dynamism was bound to 
expand rapidly. For if truth was no longer defined as that which 
serves the interests of the Party, neither would art, morality 
or justice continue to be so defined, since aH these hang closely 
together as has eventually become apparent. 

So it came to pass that the whole system of moral inversion 
broke down in the Hungarian and Polish risings of 1956. These 
movements were originally not rebellions against the Com- 
munists, but a change of mind of leading Communists. The 
Hungarian rising not only started, but went a long way towards 
victory, as a mere revulsion of Communist intellectuals from 
their own earlier convictions. The first revolutionary event was 
the meeting of a literary circle, the Petofi society, on the thirtieth 
of June, 1956. An audience of about six thousand, overflowing 
into the streets to which the proceedings were transmitted by 
loudspeakers, met for nine hours. Speaker after speaker de- 
manded freedom to write the truth ; to write about real people, 
real streets and fields, real sentiments and problems ; to report 
truthfully on current events and on matters of history. In mak- 
ing these demands many speakers were reverting to beliefs they 
had previously abhorred and even violently suppressed. 

In the months that followed these reborn principles worked 
their way rapidly further, frequently bursting out in self-accusa- 
tions by Communist intellectuals who repented their previous 
connivance in reducing truth, justice and morality, to mere 
instruments of the Party. 

This is how the decision matured which Gyula Hay, since 
then imprisoned by Kadar, declared on 22 September in 
Irodalmi Ujsag : 

'The best Communist writers have resolved after many diffi- 
culties, serious errors and bitter mental struggles that in no 
circumstances will they ever write lies again.' 

Hay realized that on these grounds all writers, both inside 
and outside the Party, were now reunited. In a speech made on 

17 September he declared: 

32 



Beyond Nihilism 

4 We Hungarian writers, irrespective of party allegiance or philo- 
sophic convictions, form hereby a firm alliance for the dissemina- 
tion of the truth. 9 

It was this alliance which lent its voice to the hitherto mute 
and powerless dissatisfaction of the workers. When the students 
marched into the streets to hold their forbidden demonstration, 
tens of thousands streamed from the factories to join them. 
Within hours the army had changed sides, the secret police was 
dissolved. The heavily armed and severely disciplined organiza- 
tion of a totalitarian state evaporated overnight, because its 
convictions had been consumed by its own newly awakened 
conscience. 

This upsurge of truth resembled up to a point the Enlighten- 
ment of the eighteenth century, but it differed from it pro- 
foundly. For the Encyclopaedists were not repudiating a string 
of lies which they had deliberately swallowed, in order to 
strengthen their own political convictions. There was no occa- 
sion for them to restore a belief in truth and morality, which 
had never been questioned by the orthodoxy they were attack- 
ing, nor ever been scorned by themselves. 

By contrast, the process of the Communist revulsion had been 
dramatically told by the Polish poet Adam Wazyk, himself a 
Party stalwart, in his Poem for Adults, written a year before the 
events in Hungary started. Fourier had promised that socialism 
would turn the seas into lemonade, and so the Party members 
had eagerly swallowed sea water as if it were lemonade. But 
eventually their stomachs turned and from time to time they 
had to retire and vomit. The word 'vomiting 9 has since become 
a technical term for describing the recoil of morally inverted 
man : the act by which he violently turns himself right way up. 
A new term was needed, because nothing of this kind had ever 
happened before. 

The Hungarian Revolution is the paradigm of an intellectual 
movement which, in less dramatic forms, has spread all through 
the area of receding dynamism, almost everywhere outside Com- 
munist China. The Soviet Government has condemned its mani- 
festation within its own domain as revisionism, and I think the 
name 'revisionism' may be applied to the different forms of this 
movement everywhere. 

Revisionism recoils from a negation. The negation took place 

33 



Michael Polanyi 

when the Enlightenment, having secularized Christian hopes, 
destroyed itself by moral inversion ; and the recoil from this 
negation occurred when moral inversion proved unstable in its 
turn. This recoil is the source of all revisionism. 

But, unfortunately, to recognize these antecedents is to call in 
question all the ideas which have hitherto guided revisionist 
movements. A re-awakened national feeing has been one of 
these ideas. Pasternak tells us how it humanized the Soviet 
regime during the war; it has then served the restoration of 
humane ideals in Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. And per- 
haps above all, it rejuvenated the ancient societies of Asia and 
Africa, creating, along with much wasteful strife, new popular 
communities which transcend the ideological conflicts of Euro- 
pean dynamism. 

Another revisionist idea lay in the new found alliance between 
liberalism and religious beliefs. The Churches seemed to recall 
modem man from a state beyond nihilism to his condition 
before the secular enlightenment. And finally, the sceptical 
mood of the Enlightenment itself has been given a new lease of 
life. The more sober, pragmatist attitude towards public affairs 
which has spread since 1950 through Britain and America, 
Germany and Austria, reproduces in its repudiation of ideolo- 
gical strife the attitude of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists 
towards religious bigotry. 

But revision cannot succeed by merely returning to ideas 
which have already proved unstable. The rule of a dogmatic 
authority is no more acceptable today than it was in the days of 
Voltaire. We shall not go back on the scientific revolution which 
has secularized extensive domains of knowledge. We shall not 
go back either on the hopes of Christianity and become as 
calmly indifferent to social wrongs as secularized antiquity had 
been. And national feeling has proved in the past no safeguard 
against the descent of dynamism into moral inversion. In fact, 
all the logical antecedents of inversion are present today just as 
they -were before. Can the very channels which had previously 
led into moral inversion now offer a retreat from it? Surely not 
for long. 

I do not wish to explore this question much further. We have 
arrived beyond nihilism today, even though the place at which 
we have arrived is similar to that where we stood before ; and 
we cannot foresee the creative possibilities by which men may 

34 



Beyond Nihilism 

discover an avenue which will not lead back to MMMsm. But one 
possibility should be mentioned. 

Perhaps the present recoil may be stabilized by the upsurge of 
a more clear-sighted political conscience. We might conceivably 
achieve a kind of suspended logic, like that which kept Britain 
and America so happily back from the road to disaster, and 
indeed this might come about the way it did in England. The 
religious wars of Europe reached this country in mid-seventeenth 
century and strife tore England for many years. One King was 
beheaded, another deposed. But the settlement of 1688, the Peti- 
tion of Right, the doctrine of John Locke, put an end to 
this conflict and established, for the first time since the rise of 
Christianity, the foundations of secular society. Civility pre- 
vailed over religious strife and a society was founded which was 
dynamic and yet united. May not Europe repeat this feat? May 
we not learn from the disasters of the past forty years to estab- 
lish a civic partnership., united in its resolve on continuous 
reforms our dynamism restrained by the knowledge that radi- 
calism will throw us back into disaster the moment we try to 
act out its principles literally? 

It may happen. But this is hardly a legitimate field for specu- 
lation ; for from this point onwards, thought must take on the 
form of action. 



35 



Messianism, Nihilism and the Future 
RICHARD LOWENTHAL 

To look for the origin of the nihilistic ideological passions 
that have devastated the lives of our generation and are 
still menacing the next ; to try to discern the chances for 
an abatement of these passions, on which the survival of civil- 
ized life on our planet may depend there could hardly be a 
more important subject for a discussion of the role of ideas in 
our time. 

Yet Polanyi's approach to its analysis, for all its original and 
fruitful suggestions, seems to me to suffer from two opposite 
limitations. On one side, he confines his inquiry deliberately to the 
inner logic of ideas, as if the whole witches' cauldron of our time 
had been set a-boiling by an initial error in the recipe; in his 
setting of the scene heresies are breeding further heresies almost 
without regard to the conditions of life which confronted the 
heretics. Of course, this is a conscious methodical device ; Pol- 
anyi shows his awareness of its limitations when referring to the 
merciful lack of logic displayed in the English failure to follow 
up the same initial assumptions which elsewhere led to nihilism. 
But as this example shows, it is most unlikely that a valid fore- 
cast of the chances for transcending the age of ideological pas- 
sions could be made without going beyond the limits of the 
history and logic of ideas. 

On the other hand, and paradoxically, Polanyi does not seem 
to have taken the ideas whose origin and role he is discussing 
quite seriously enough. If I understand him rightly, he defines 
modern nihilism as the cult of revolutionary violence not as a 
means to an end, but as an aim in itself; and he apparently 
assumes that this concept covers both Nazism and Stalinism. 
It is his thesis that the manifest political immoralism of both has 
developed from a common origin in the passionate social moral- 
ity of Rousseau by a process of 'moral inversion', because the 

37 



Richard Lowenthal 

original moral purpose, having become combined with a s natur- 
alistic 5 view of man., ended by becoming 'immanent' in the cult 
of force. He traces several roads to nihilism, and we meet on 
them such varied characters as the Marquis de Sade and the 
German romantics, Nechayev and Nietzsche, Lenin and the 
French existentialists ; but the critical point of 'moral inversion * 
through which all these roads must pass is located with Karl 
Marx, who according to Professor Polanyi said that 'viol- 
ence alone must be the aim of a scientific socialism 5 . 

I submit that this interpretation bears no obvious relation to 
anything Marx ever wrote, and is indeed in demonstrable con- 
flict with much he did write. But if that can be shown, it affects 
not only Polanyi's map of the historical road to modern 
nihilism, but his basic concept of the identical ideological origin 
of the two great 4 secular fanaticisms ' of our time. 

Let me, then, state at the outset that Communist and Nazi 
ideological attitudes to violence have always been sharply differ- 
ent even during the period of the worst Stalinist crimes. The 
crimes, of course, were similar ; the ideological justifications were 
not. There was a cult of violence for its own sake, a belief in the 
value of war and brutality in themselves for raising a higher type 
of man, in Nazism and Fascism over and above the belief that 
violence was needed for victory, as a means to an end. There was 
no such belief in Stalinism where even the worst crimes were 
justified as needed for the defence of the threatened * workers' 
state ' against 4 imperialist plots ', the most ruthless mass deporta- 
tions and liquidations as necessary stages towards the attain- 
ment of the classless society and the fulfilment of humanistic 
values. 

Lest anybody should think this a distinction without a differ- 
ence, three of its practical consequences should be mentioned 
here. The first is the contrast, a hundred times attested, between 
the callous indifference of the Soviet labour camps and the 
deliberate sadism of the Nazi KZ's, used as a means for 'hard- 
ening' the SS elite. The second is the simple fact that we all are 
alive, though Stalin had atom bombs since 1949; if he had 
gloried in violence for its own sake and not as a means to an 
end, to be judged by criteria of expediency, we probably should 
not be. The third is the very same inteEectual revolt of Hungar- 
ian and Polish Communist writers which Polanyi describes a 
revolt based on the discrepancy between the professed humanistic 

38 



Messiamism^ Nihilism and the Future 

values and the inhuman practice of the regime : if the ideology 
had been as "nihilistic 5 as the practice, there would have been 
no revulsion among its believers. 

Professor Polanyi is barred from perceiving the difference by 
his belief that the cult of violence as an aim in itself started with 
Marx. He bases this view on Marx's criticism of detailed plans 
for a socialist Utopia, which, according to Polanyi, argued * that 
nothing beyond this act of violence' (the revolution) 'was re- 
quired, or even to be considered, since it was unscientific to 
make any plans for the new society'. Yet Marx, while rejecting 
detailed institutional plans, did in fact draw fairly precise out- 
lines for his own Utopia. He wrote of the two post-revolution- 
ary stages of Socialism public ownership of the means of 
production, with equal rewards for equal labour and Com- 
munism abolition of the wage system and distribution accord- 
ing to needs ; of the 'withering away' of the state as a separate 
apparatus of force, once the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' had 
broken the resistance of the former exploiting classes and de- 
stroyed their economic basis ; of the disappearance of the struc- 
tural difference between town and countryside, and of the 
professional division of labour between supervisory and manual 
work. Such was the classless society which was to be the final 
outcome of the proletarian revolution ; nor did Marx even re- 
gard violence as indispensable for the achievement of this aim in 
all countries. In his famous speech at Amsterdam on September 
8, 1872 immediately after the Hague Congress which had split 
the first International and ended his participation in it Marx 
admitted 'that there exist countries like America, England, and 
if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland, where 
the workers may be able to attain their ends by peaceful means '. 
By contrast, he believed that violence was needed to achieve 
these ends in the leading continental countries ; but it was the ends 
that were given by his general theory, and the means that were 
contingent to Mm. In turn, these aims were clearly derived from 
the humanistic values of the enlightenment; and whether these 
values were based in his inind on a 'naturalistic' view of man 
may be open to controversy in the light of the philosophical 
writings of his youth. 

Marx and Ms followers, then, did not refuse to 'justify' revo- 
lutionary terror by its 'noble aspirations' any more than Robes- 
pierre had done though the language used by them in defining 

39 



Richard Lowenthal 

these aspirations was, of course, different. In attacking 'bour- 
geois morality' as hypocritical, they never ceased to attack it 
from the basis of its own professed values the values of the 
Judaeo-Christian and liberal-humanist tradition and to claim 
that only the destruction of the existing social and political 
order could lead to a society truly inspired by these values ; in 
just the same way, the revisionist critics of the Stalinist dictator- 
ships in Hungary and Poland attacked its practice as hypo- 
critical on the basis of its own humanistic ideological claims. 
This attitude is diametrically opposed to that which, starting 
from disgust with the same hypocrisy of the old order, concludes 
that the values themselves are false and should be replaced by 
an honest cult of the right of the stronger, the ennobling quali- 
ties of violence and the rejection of all traditional moral re- 
straints in principle. That latter attitude, to which the term of 
nihilism should properly be reserved, can be traced in different 
versions and on different levels in the Marquis de Sade and in 
some figures of Dostoievsky, in Nietzsche and the ' social Dar- 
winism' of Spencer and his school, and finally in the Fascist and 
National Socialist movements. But while it is rooted in a similar 
historical situation as Jacobin and Marxist political Messianism, 
and may ultimately lead to similar political consequences, it is a 
spiritually and ideologically quite distinct phenomenon. This 
remains true, although there have been notable cases of a con- 
fusion of both attitudes, as with Bakunin and Nechayev, and 
with the discovery of de Sade by Marxist existentialists in 
France, and of transition from one to the other, as with Musso- 
lini. 

Given, then, that the political Messianists of the Left start 
from the common humanistic heritage of our civilization, what 
is there in their ideology that has led them repeatedly to erect 
terror into a system of power? I can discuss here only two ele- 
ments, the first of which is by now generally familiar: the belief 
in a secular paradise, and in its dependence on the achievement 
of total power by an organized elite. 

Professor Polanyi has pointed to the example of the chiliastic 
sects of the pre-Reformation and Reformation age, and to the 
secularization of the Millennial dream with the general secular- 
ization of Western society. But in speaking of 'secular fana- 
ticism' and 'moral passions' rather than of secular or political 

40 



Messianism^ Nihilism and the Future 

religions lie has, I feel, underestimated the power which the 
revolutionary myth derives from its specificaEy religious content ; 
the writers who have stressed this aspect men like Berd- 
yayev, Waldemar Gurian, F. A. Voigt, or Talmon were them- 
selves religious thinkers, and they knew what they were talking 
about. There is more than 'moral passion' in an elaborate 
system that tells us that mankind started in a state of innocence 
(state of nature, primitive Communism), was corrupted by am- 
bition and avarice (class society, state, exploitation) and will 
eventually enter a realm of perfect justice where all sin (oppres- 
sion, exploitation, rivalry) and conflict will disappear and no 
compulsion will be needed : this is a sacred history and a promise 
of salvation on earth. Marx's achievement as a mythmaker was 
precisely to have invested the 'laws of history' and the class 
struggle of the proletariat with this religious meaning. 

Yet the Marxian myth of the inevitable victory of the prole- 
tariat that would bring about the classless society was only the 
basis from which a totalitarian ideology, with all the conse- 
quences we know, could develop : it was not yet that ideology 
itself. For those consequences one further step was required 
the unconditional identification of the hope of secular salvation, 
not with the victory of a class, of a social or historic force, but 
with the power of a specific organized group and its leader. An 
abstract paradise may justify crimes but only a concrete Mes- 
siah can authorize and order them. 

With Karl Marx, the Messiah remained abstract : the Prole- 
tariat. He wrote of its dictatorship, but had no definite views 
about its necessary political form ; Engels even came to regard a 
democratic republic as the specific form for it towards the end of 
his life. Marx never led a conspiratorial party or aspired to 
power in its name, he was a prophet, but it did not occur to him 
to claim the role of Messiah for himself. More than that, he was 
convinced that the victory of the proletariat could and would 
take different political forms in different countries. If his passion 
was attached to the final aim, his powerful mind and his working 
energy was devoted to an understanding of all the varied forms 
of the process that would lead to it: there could be no passe- 
partout, no master-key to history and a fortiori no universal 
political recipe. 

It is this fixation to a recipe of total power which marks the 
transformation of a chiliastic myth into a totalitarian ideology. 

41 



Richard Lowenthat 

In theory, salvation may still be providentially inevitable, but in 
practice it comes to depend on the triumph of the true believers, 
organized in an exclusive sect. This triumph, the conquest and 
preservation of power by 'the Party', thus comes to be viewed 
as the one indispensable guarantee for the achievement of the 
final aim the precondition for the attainment of all the values 
which motivated the movement. Power (not violence as such) 
thus becomes an intermediate (though not an ultimate) aim in 
itself; the vision of the believers is focused on this single point 
through which the March of History must pass, and on which 
all their energies must concentrate, and is correspondingly 
narrowed. Henceforth, all actions will be judged solely by 
their expediency in the struggle for power, not by reference 
to the moral values embodied in the final aim : the intermed- 
iate but indispensable aim of power has attracted all the 
salvational importance of the final aim unto itself, and has come 
like a dark tunnel between the believer and his original Utopian 
vision. 

In the Marxist tradition, the decisive step in this transforma- 
tion was accomplished by Lenin. Marx, in contrast to many of 
the revolutionary conspirators of his time, never accepted the 
doctrine that 'the end justifies the means* as a general principle. 
He approved of revolutionary terror against the 'class enemy' 
he admired both the Jacobins for using it when in power, and 
the Russian 'Narodnaya Volya' for using it in opposition to 
Tsarism when other means were denied them. Yet he was gen- 
uinely horrified by Nechayev's 'murder for Party discipline', 
just as were most Russian revolutionaries at the time: while 
repudiating what he called 'bourgeois morality', Marx in fact 
judged the actions of his fellow-revolutionaries by a definite 
moral standard and not by exclusive reference to the expediency 
of Party power. 

Lenin, on the other hand, did regard every means as justified 
in principle ; it is no accident that he expressed admiration for 
Nechayev's energy and ruthlessness, though he did not speci- 
fically refer to the murder. If he did accept in practice certain 
restraints in dealing with opponents within his party, even after 
he was in power, the borderline could not be defined within his 
doctrines, and Stalin only carried Leninism to its logical con- 
clusion in doing away with those restraints. The basis for the 
decisive change from Marx to Lenin was, of course, that Lenin's 

42 



Messianism, Nihilism and the Future 

political Messlanism was Institutionally and personally concrete 
as Marx's was not : Lenin was convinced from an early date that 
unless Ms party took power, the aim could not be achieved, and 
that his party could not win and hold power unless it followed 
his leadership. 

Yet neither Lenin nor even Stalin ever regarded power as an 
end in itself: they kept justifying their actions by the vision of 
the aim, and seeking to transform society at great cost in order 
to get nearer to it. Still less did a nihilistic cult of violence for its 
own sake develop at any stage of the moral descent from Marx 
via Lenin to Stalin. The true horror of Communist political 
Messianism, unlike that of nihilism of the Nazi type, is the 
horror of unconscious and indeed fanatical hypocrisy of ruth- 
less amoralism justified by the subjectively sincere profession of 
belief in a millennial rule of the saints. 

To the Conservative, not only any revolutionary, but any 
radical critic of the traditional order and its conventional hypo- 
crisy easily appears as a nihilist. Many of the young Russian 
followers of the critic Pisarev in the late 1850's, for whom Tur- 
genev coined the term, were not even political revolutionaries, 
though they certainly advanced a crudely naturalistic view of 
man ; they were, in fact, proponents of the new morality of the 
emancipated Russian intelligentsia, and formed part of a 
broader intellectual current to which also such revolutionary 
social critics as Chernyshevsky belonged. In the 70's and 80's, 
the terrorists of the Narodnaya Volya, to whom the label of 
nihilists was generally applied in the West though not in Russia 
and least of all by themselves, were men and women who com- 
bined ruthlessness in striking down a few selected enemies with 
exceptionally high moral standards and with an insistence that 
they did not wish to use force to secure power for themselves : 
once they had overthrown Tsarism, they proclaimed, they 
would call the first free elections in Russian history and compete 
in them, with an anarcho-socialist programme, on equal terms 
with any other party. The only documents of the Russian nine- 
teenth-century revolutionary movement that deserve the descrip- 
tion of 'nihilist' as used today are some of Bakunin's paeans to 
the 'creative delight of destruction*, and particularly the 
'Catechism of the Revolutionary* he wrote for Nechayev; and 
only these documents, which were sharply rejected by the bulk 

D 43 



Richard Lowenthal 

of the contemporary revolutionaries, show a combination of the 
cult of destruction and violence with the vision of the anarchistic 
millennium of free co-operators. 

On the whole, however, the believers in the c creative delight 
of destruction' have been people who rejected this vision and 
the underlying Christian and humanistic values. They 'have 
rejected both Christian charity and secular fraternity, both the 
equality of the immortal souls before God and the equality of 
mortal citizens before the law or in their social status and 
chances. The millennium that their Messiah was to bring was to 
end the degenerative influence of both the gospel and the 
enlightenment, and to restore the healthy, revitalizing rule of the 
strong, of the aristocracy of Nature. The formal structure of 
their vision of history, it is true, showed the same origin in the 
tripartite apocalyptic scheme as that of their Marxist antipodes, 
with biology replacing economics as the master-key to history, 
the state of innocence identified with racial purity, and the fall 
with the bastardization of the chosen race ; but the content of 
the final vision and the values inspiring it were so diametrically 
opposed to Christian morality that there seems to be almost as 
little point in describing the racist ideology as 'chiliastic' or as a 
'political Messianism' as there is in describing the Marxist 
myth as 'nihilist'. 

Yet the apocalyptic form of the racialist myth points to the 
fact that it, too, represents a secular religion a sacred history 
mapping out the road to salvation on this earth. Only its spiri- 
tual model is not to be found in the typical chiliastic heresies, 
but in the antinomian and satanistic ones those which sought 
escape from the burden of guilt and moral conflict in the doc- 
trine that every e sin' was permitted to the Elect, and that the 
ability to commit deeds which to others were deadly sin without 
a sense of guilt was the very proof of election. In Norman 
Cohn's study of medieval heresies which Polanyi quotes, the 
wide spread of this form of heretical mysticism the so-called 
'Free Spirits' or 'Spiritual Libertines' in medieval Europe is 
documented in detail ; it also shows that the communities of the 
Elect, having attained, in their own conviction, a state of union 
with God or even of independence of God, felt entitled not only 
to satisfy all their carnal desires but amoralism, based on the 
overcoming of all moral conflict by the introjection of God, was 
the sign of salvation; while the persistence of the pangs of 

44 



Messianism, Nihilism and the Future 

conscience was evidence of separation from God, and hence of 
damnation. 

Now it is these ' amoral supermen ' not ' moral supermen ', as 
Polanyi misquotes whom Norman Cohn describes as the re- 
mote precursors of the followers of Bakunin and Nietzsche and 
of 'the armed bohemians of our days' ; he does not assign that 
role, as Polanyi' s text would suggest, to the chiliastic sects con- 
fronted by the problem of power (such as the Taborite extrem- 
ists in the Hussite wars or the Minister Anabaptists during the 
Reformation), whom he views as the remote precursors of our 
contemporary Communists. 

In the first place, the 'Free Spirit' heresy, like its modern 
secular counterpart, is not unlversalist : unlike the true chiliastic 
sects, it offers a road to salvation not to all mankind, but only to 
the few who are called to use, and abuse, the many. Further, it Is 
not originally political, in the sense that the salvation of the 
believers does not depend on a triumph over their adversaries 
and the achievement of the final state of mankind : once they 
have individually become Free Spirits, once they have joined the 
ranks of the Elect, they are God-like and free from sin. It follows 
that their freedom from all moral restraints does not depend on a 
calculus of political expediency on the right to use all means 
for a sacred end but is absolute, and this applies just as much 
to modern nihilist elites. The otherwise most perceptive analysis 
of contemporary secular religions in F. A. Voigt's Unto Caesar 
errs In the statement that both the proletariat in the Marxian 
and the master race In the Hitlerite myth are 'free from sin': 
the Marxian proletariat is not free from sin, but has the mission 
to bring about a millennium in which its own proletarian con- 
dition will disappear along with all the conditions of human 
corruption, but the Hitlerite master race is indeed free from sin 
as such, even before its victory, and therefore absolutely above 
all moral yardsticks. 

There is, then, in Nazism no 'moral inversion' in the sense in 
which Polanyi uses the term; for the manifest immoralism of its 
methods of action, so far from being in conflict with the ' master 
morality' underlying the movement, is its direct, if extreme, 
manifestation. Rather we may say that there is here and also in 
Nietzsche's revolt against Christian values, or in Bakunin's 
glorification of the brigand as the true revolutionary a genuine 
nihilism, a morality of negation: for all these attitudes do not 

45 



Richard Lowenthal 

spring from a pagan unconcern with Christian values rooted in a 
different culture, but from the desperate efforts of people reared 
in the Christian tradition to throw off the burden of guilt which 
has become unbearable to them. 

I have tried to separate the moral attitudes embodied in the 
two major secular religious currents of our time, and to indicate 
their spiritual origins. What of the historic context in which they 
have gained power over the minds of men? 

Before risking any hypothesis about dynamic causes, there are 
clearly some intellectual conditions, common to both of them, 
which must be listed. There can be little disagreement about 
those among students of modern history. The first, emphasized 
by Polanyi, is secularization itself Man's attempt to conceive 
the meaning of life in this world in immanent terms. The second, 
closely linked to this, but perhaps not fully brought out in Ms 
paper, is the democratic concept in the broadest sense of the 
word : the idea that the political and social order, no longer re- 
garded as God-given, should derive its sanction from the will of 
the people. It is perhaps not superfluous to point out that all 
totalitarian ideologies are based on the fiction that the totali- 
tarian movement represents the true will of the people, the 
volonte generate in Rousseau's sense ; the fiction is not confined 
to the totalitarianism of the Left, as J. L. Talmon seems to 
assume, but was equally used as a justification of Italian Fascism 
by Giovanni Gentile, its original official philosopher, and in 
Germany by Karl Schmitt In fact, of course, the very idea of a 
totalitarian political movement gaining power and then con- 
tinuing to mobilize the masses for the purposes of its regime is 
only conceivable in an age where a democratic legitimation has 
become indispensable for every regime. 

The third major intellectual condition for the rise of the revo- 
lutionary historical myths is the conscious experience of historic 
change, and the fourth the confidence in the scientific predicta- 
bility of the natural order engendered by the progress of science, 
which is then extended to the field of history. On both points, 
there is no need for me to add to Professor Polanyi's paper. 
Together, secularization, the democratic concept, the experience 
of historic change and the belief in its scientific predictability 
form the indispensable intellectual background to the totali- 
tarian ideologies or * secular religions' we are discussing; but 

46 



Messianism^ Nihilism and the Future 

they also form the general intellectual background to the mod- 
ern world since the end of the eighteenth century. Yet these 
ideologies have arisen with powerful effect, in certain countries 
and at certain times, while others have proved largely immune 
to them. 

The logic of secularization, of the new democratic legitima- 
tion, and of the belief in the predictable progress of history has 
thus not been sufficient to produce these ideologies by itself; 
more specific factors must have been decisive for their rise at 
specific places and times. Perhaps the best way to start the search 
for these dynamic causes is to begin from Professor Polanyi's 
reference to the 'merciful lack of logic' of the English. It seems 
to me that, in seeking an explanation for the comparatively un- 
dramatic course that the process of secularization took in Eng- 
land and some other countries, he has overlooked the most 
obvious common factor in the life of those countries the role of 
Protestantism in its post-Calvinist form. 

To understand that role, it may be helpful to cast our minds 
back to an earlier great moral crisis of the West the crisis that 
began in the Renaissance and was ended by the Reformation 
and Counter-Reformation. Western society and the Roman 
Church had long learned to live with the contradiction between 
the eschatological morality of the gospel and the corruption of 
natural man, and had adapted a workaday version of Christian 
morality wMch combined the necessary sanctions for social 
discipline with practical toleration of an irreducible core of sin- 
fulness, acceptable to all but the small chiliastic underground 
current. But this version was tied to a traditional way of life 
which became increasingly disrupted with the rise of a com- 
mercial economy in the advanced regions of Renaissance 
Europe, from Flanders to Northern Italy and Bohemia ; and as 
this disruption proceeded, the moral prescriptions of the 
Church tended to appear increasingly absurd and illogical 
at the very time when masses of believers, socially uprooted 
and uncertain about the conduct of their lives in the new con- 
ditions, were most in need of its guidance. It was in that moral 
crisis that chiliastic sectarianism first grew from a scattered 
underground into a mass movement, and that the worldly cor- 
ruption of the Church became bitterly offensive to large numbers 
of believers. 

Now this crisis had arisen before the age of secularization, 

47 



Richard Lowenthal 

and it was overcome within the framework of Christian belief 
by a number of spiritual and hierarchical changes which ulti- 
mately resulted in a revision of the moral code commonly 
accepted by Christian communities. The contents of the new 
code, based on a new accommodation of Christian values to a 
more dynamic and acquisitive society, were not vastly different 
in the Calvinist countries of Northwest Europe and the Catholic 
countries who had passed through the Counter-Reformation; 
but the manner in which the new code was 'enacted' differed 
decisively. In the countries of modernized Catholicism, the new 
code, like the traditional one before it, continued to depend on 
the authority and discipline of the Church; hence its validity in 
the minds of the faithful was bound up with the validity of 
Christian dogma. In the countries of Calvinism and post-Cal- 
vinist sectarianism. Church authority was successively nation- 
alized, democratized, splintered and finally broken up in favour 
of the autonomy of the individual conscience ; yet in the very 
process of revolt against the old Church, the new code had been 
internalized and embedded in that individual conscience, there 
to take on an existence that no longer depended on any external 
authority, old or new. 

I believe that this difference is the key to the riddle of why the 
modern process of secularization and democratization has 
affected different Christian communities in so radically different 
ways. Where the Christian code of conduct was bound up with 
the authority and discipline of the Church, and the Church 
closely linked with an authoritarian State, the decline of belief 
in dogma, by undermining the authority of both Church and 
State, was bound to produce both a political and a moral crisis. 
Where morality had ceased to depend on Church authority, the 
decline of dogmatic belief produced no moral crisis in the lives 
of the people, and political institutions could be revalued as con- 
venient rather than sacred. To this day, it is a common experi- 
ence that the former Catholic who loses his faith may become 
either an unbelieving hedonist or a believing Communist, while 
the former Puritan, when ceasing to be a believing Christian, 
tends to become a secularized Puritan. The post-Calvinist coun- 
tries Britain, the United States, Holland, and also the Scan- 
dinavian countries where the Lutheran State Church during the 
nineteenth century lost much ground to various * Free Churches ' 
of the Anglo-Saxon type have produced no secular religions 

48 



Messianism, Nihilism and the Future 

because the process of secularization, having failed to under- 
mine the internalized morality of modern Protestantism, created 
no void in the lives of their people. 

It is not difficult to see how this analysis could be applied also 
to other Christian and non-Christian communities. Russian 
orthodoxy was not only authoritarian and closely linked to 
Tsarist despotism, but had never undergone a reformation or 
counter-reformation adjusting it to the problems of modem 
life ; hence in nineteenth-century Russia, the moral crisis with 
which Western Europe coped in the Reformation and the crisis 
of secularization were telescoped into one, in the sense that the 
secularization of the intelligentsia's thought faced it with the 
need to reconstruct its moral and religious attitudes from their 
very foundations : the void to be filled was larger than anywhere 
in the West. German Lutheranism, a form of Protestantism 
whose development was arrested at an early stage, before the 
working out of a 'modern 5 code of Christian morality achieved 
in the Calvinist West, retained a peculiar polarity between 
obedience to outward authority in all matters of the political 
and social order, and a personal morality that was internalized 
in the individual conscience yet remained formless and incal- 
culable : under the impact of secularization and the destruction 
of traditional authority, it gave rise both to romantic individu- 
alism and to a sense of anomaly a moral void resulting in a 
craving for leadership. Among the non-Christian religions, it 
seems logical to expect that those in which both the element of 
metaphysical dogma and of authoritarian organization are 
weak, while the moral teaching is central, as in the higher ver- 
sions of Buddhism, would survive the impact of secularization 
particularly well; the opposite might be expected of Islam, 
whose teaching has long been bound up with the traditional 
social and political order. 

The foregoing discussion has suggested what I believe to be 
one of the dynamic causes as distinct from the general intellec- 
tual preconditions for the rise of the secular religions of our 
time : the collapse of traditional authority in a society where 
rules of conduct are dependent on external authority both for 
their preservation and their gradual adjustment to changing 
conditions. Where that happens the conjunction of seculariza- 
tion and social change produces a moral crisis analogous to the 

49 



Richard Lowenthal 

Western crisis of the Renaissance, and out of that crisis arise 
secular religions which are equally analogous to the openly 
religious chiliastic and satanistic movements of that earlier 
period. In either case, it seems to be the unbearable conflict 
between the experience of the changing world and the teachings 
of traditional authority, rather than the fact of secularization as 
such, which produces first the widespread sense of disorientation 
and uprootedness and then the flight into a new fanatical faith. 

At this point, we must return to Professor Polanyfs image of 
an 'outburst of moral passion', which evidently is his interpre- 
tation of the same phenomenon. If I understand him correctly, 
he would agree that it was the destruction of traditional moral 
authority that made that outburst possible, and he could also 
without inconsistency accept the above view that it was the non- 
authoritarian character of post-Calvinist morality that deprived 
the process of secularization of similarly catastrophic conse- 
quences in the area over which this spontaneous moral con- 
formism of the Nonconformists held away. But where I feel I 
must part company with him is his idea of 'moral passion' itself 
the attempt to explain the fanaticism of the new movements 
by a sudden increase in the moral sensitivity of man. 

The concept of passion properly belongs to the realm of 
psychology ; yet psychology, as Polanyi himself points out, has 
hitherto not spoken of moral passions, only of instinctive 
passions and moral restraints upon them. He seems to have over- 
looked that psychology is thoroughly familiar with the pheno- 
menon of instinctive passions masquerading as moral in order 
to overcome the restraints. In the compulsive individual, an 
intense effort to restrain aggressive impulses may lead to an 
apparent excess of self-sacrificing, altruistic kindness ; yet as this 
extreme of altruism is turned into a moral yardstick for judging 
his fellows, it enables him in fact to yield to his aggressive 
impulses under the mask of a censorious saintliness. The Freud- 
ians know this classical mechanism of apparent 'moral inver- 
sion ' as ' the return of the repressed '. 

The example of individual psychology suggests that, when 
confronted with an apparent sudden increase in moral idealism 
in the history of our society, we should beware of taking it at 
face value and rather look for conditions ttat may have pro- 
duced an intensification of moral conflict, leading to a morally 
disguised eruption of aggressive tendencies. There seems, in 

50 



Messianism^ Nihilism and the Future 

fact, to be little reason to assume that the balance between 
instinctive passions and restraints has ever substantially changed 
in the course of the history of civilized humanity, though the 
concrete nature of permitted instinctive outlets and socially en- 
forced taboos has assumed an infinite variety of cultural forms ; 
and the complaint that Polanyi sets out to refute that man's 
morality has failed to keep step with the progress of Ms power 
over nature seems correspondingly meaningless to me. The 
meaningful complaint, and one that I have heard much more 
frequently, is that man's understanding and control of the forces 
active in human society, and hence the adjustment of the con- 
crete content of his morality to the changing nature of that 
society, has failed so to keep in step ; and that cannot be refuted 
by pointing to the 'outburst of moral passion 5 which on the 
contrary, if analysed in its historical context, points to that very 
failure of adjustment. 

In fact, the broadest common denominator for the origin of 
both the openly religious and the secularized forms of chiliastic 
or satanistic mass movements appears to be that they arise 
where civilized societies have failed to respond adequately to 
accelerated social change to adjust their institutions and their 
moral codes to the changed situation in such a way as to 
preserve the possibility of meaningful life in accordance with 
their basic values. Wherever technological and social change 
causes large numbers of people to lose their accepted place in 
society, shattering both their material security and their sense 
of their own worth, it also undermines their confidence in the 
meaning of their way of life and their readiness to abide by 
accepted rules of conduct. The intense self-doubt, anxiety and 
frustration of the materially and morally uprooted masses find 
expression in conflicting tendencies to aggressive rebellion and 
passive submission tendencies which may then be canalized 
into acceptance of a chiliastic or satanistic ideology offered by 
any disaffected prophetic elite that is ready to hand and suffi- 
ciently organized for exploiting the crisis. What appears as an 
outburst of Utopian hopes and demands, a sudden insatiable 
longing for perfect justice on this e^rth, is really a desperate 
reaction to the glaring failure of the old order to live up even to 
its own imperfect traditional standards in a radically changed 
situation ; what appears as a sudden nihilistic rage to throw off 
all moral restraints is really a desperate flight from intolerable 

51 



Richard Lowenthal 

moral conflicts in a world whose accepted codes have become 
transparently meaningless or hypocritical. The established com- 
promise between the ideals of religious ethics and the incor- 
rigible sinfulness of man, or between social discipline and the 
instinctive drives of the individual, is not shattered by a sudden 
increase in either saintly idealism or animal brutality; the 
anarchic outbursts of both idealism and brutality are only the 
consequence of the fact that the established compromise has 
already broken down, because it has not been adjusted in time 
to the facts of unpremeditated and unforeseen social change. 

The above does not only apply to the once-and-for-all process 
of secularization and of the breakdown of traditional authority 
with its religious sanctions, but to all those profound social 
crises which transcend the field of purely institutional change and 
endanger the continuity of a civilization and its moral values. 
The crisis of secularization and the transition from a tradition- 
bound, authoritarian order to modern industrial society clearly 
forms the background to the Communist revolutions we have 
seen, and may yet lead to the victory of totalitarian movements 
in other countries. But the chiliastic outbreaks in the non- 
secularized Europe of the pre-Reformation and Reformation 
period on one side, and the nihilistic explosion of Nazism in 
modern, industrially developed Germany on the other, were 
closely similar in origin. As the German case proves, the failure 
of a modern free society to control its own dynamism of social 
change may make it as vulnerable to a social and moral crisis 
ending in an ideological, totalitarian revolution as any society 
founded on traditional authority that is being undermined by 
secularization. 

Starting from the importance of the collapse of traditional 
authority in countries with authority-bound rules of conduct as 
one of the dynamic causes for the rise of our contemporary 
secular religions, we have thus arrived at a more general factor : 
the failure of adjustment of institutions and values to accelerat- 
ing social change. I am, of course, far from claiming that this 
factor could furnish by itself an exhaustive explanation of the 
phenomenon under discussion; apart from other familiar ele- 
ments, a more searching investigation of the interaction between 
the rise of ideologically disaffected elites during the often pro- 
longed period of pre-revolutionary gestation and the growth 
of the mass movement in the actual revolutionary crisis is 

52 



Messianism, Nihilism and the Future 

needed. What has been said here Is merely offered as a corrective 
to the tendency to interpret the rise of these movements merely 
as the unfolding of the inner logic of the Messianic ideas which 
are endemic in our Judaeo-Christian civilization to explain, in 
fact, the rise of the ideologies in purely ideological terms. 

Survivors of a volcanic eruption, engaged in rebuilding their 
homes and restarting the shattered routine of their lives, are 
probably apt to reassure each other that the age of eruptions is 
over, and that their particular volcano, at any rate, is now 
extinct. Do we really have better evidence than that for congrat- 
ulating ourselves on the end of the ideological age? 

Apart from the devout wish of most of those who have con- 
sciously lived through the past few decades to be saved from 
salvation, and to be allowed to Hve the rest of their lives in less 
interesting times, belief in the end of ideologies is usually 
founded on two sets of facts ; the visible exhaustion of ideolog- 
ical interest in the post-war Western world, also and particularly 
among the young generation ; and the apparent indications of an 
erosion, or at least a routinization, of ideological fervour in 
post-Stalin Russia. Now it is a familiar historic experience that 
periods of great revolutionary upheavals are followed by a sense 
of exhaustion. But while in England the new sense of national 
unity and the devotion of civic and moral energies to steady 
evolution which followed the revolutionary settlement of 1688 
showed a remarkable longevity, the exhaustion which followed 
the end of the Napoleonic wars in France did not. The differ- 
ence, clearly, lay in the quality of the solutions found for the 
social and moral problems which had caused the revolutionary 
crisis : without a solution capable both of winning fairly general 
acceptance and of being gradually adjusted to further social 
change, temporary exhaustion was clearly not enough to assure 
a lasting return to civility. 

As for the alleged erosion of the official ideology in the Soviet 
Union, the facts are as yet far from clear. This is not the place to 
discuss the problems of the basis and functions of ideology 
under a victorious totalitarian regime; but it should at least be 
understood that they are entirely different from the role of an 
ideology of totalitarian revolution in a free society. Having 
become institutionalized in a monopolistic party dictatorship to 
which it serves as legitimation and driving force, the ideology 

53 



Richard Lowenthal 

may continue to bring about both vast domestic transformations 
and critical international conflicts long after the masses and even 
large sectors of the privileged bureaucracy have lost faith in it. 
Western observers have discerned symptoms of ideological ero- 
sion in the NEP-Russia of the middle 20's, which was followed 
by Stalin's forced collectivization ; in the Kirov period of in- 
ternal relaxation in 1934, which was followed by the great blood 
purge; in the wartime concessions to Russian patriotic and 
orthodox traditions, which were followed by the Sovietization 
of Eastern Europe and the ideological revivalism of Zhdanov. 
The post-Stalin relaxation of ideological 'monolithism* has in 
fact been followed by another attempt at an ideological revival 
sponsored by Krushchev ; and though there are indications that 
the new dictator's attempt to avoid a return to Stalinist mass 
terrorism has made it more difficult for him to enforce ideolog- 
ical conformity, all the evidence goes to show that both he and 
his principal associates are true believers and aware of the 
dependence of their own rule on the maintenance of the doctrine. 
This is not to say that totalitarian ideological rule can never end 
in Russia only that the eventual victory of ideological agnosti- 
cism is not to be expected unless the power of the party is 
decisively weakened in another crisis of succession. 

Professor Polanyi does indeed go beyond the usual thesis of 
erosion ; he suggests that some of the original acts of repudiation 
of Stalin's heritage by his successors sprang from a genuine 
moral revulsion against the consequences of 'nihilist* ideolog- 
ical rule, and thus were true forerunners of the revolt of the 
consciences of Polish and Hungarian Communist intellectuals 
which grew from these first tentative steps of destalinization. 
Unfortunately, the facts do not bear out this interpretation. For 
instance, while Polanyi assumes that the heirs of Stalin repudi- 
ated the frame-up against the Kremlin doctors because they 
thought it better to have truth on their side, it seems a more 
natural explanation that they did so because the frame-up had 
been aimed at some of them; more specifically, the repudiation 
was announced by Beria, but after Beria's fall Ms ex-colleagues 
had no compunction in placing responsibility for the original 
frame-up on him! Again, Krushchev's 'secret speech* was an 
important step both in freeing his hand for policy changes by 
destroying the legend of Stalin's infallibility, and in reassuring 
the leading bureaucratic personnel of party and state that the 

54 



Messianism? Nihilism and the Future 

replacement of "collective leadership' by Krushchev's one-man 
rule would not mean a return to Stalin's inner-party terror; but 
attempts to make the rehabilitation of some of Stalin's victims 
the starting point for a truthful rewriting of Party history were 
quickly stopped. Nevertheless Krushchev's disclosures, as well 
as his recognition that Stalin had been wrong In his dispute with 
Tito, shook not only Stalin's but Russia's authority In Eastern 
Europe, as well as that of local Communist leaders who had 
murdered their comrades as 'Titoists 5 on Stalin's orders ; and on 
that basis the genuine moral revulsion of the Communist intel- 
lectuals became possible In Poland and Hungary. Yet however 
encouraging this development was in Itself, it seems too slender 
a basis for proclaiming that a general turning-point has been 
reached in the attraction of totalitarian Ideologies in our time, 
and of Leninist Communism In particular. 

Finally, it should not be forgotten that Chinese Communism 
achieved total domination of a potential Great Power after 
more than twenty years of civil war in 1949 at a time when, in 
Polanyi's view, the ideological age was already on its way out 
and has shown an unexampled ideological virulence in recent 
years. More generally, it is a commonplace that many of the 
causes which have In the past led to the victory of secular 
religions in countries freshly torn from a static authoritarian 
tradition Into the whirlpool of industrialization and seculariza- 
tion, are now operating In many of the newly emancipated 
'undeveloped countries' ; and while there is, on the basis of the 
foregoing analysis, no predestined inevitability that any or all of 
them must suffer the same fate, there is certainly no a priori 
reason why the danger of such a development should be less in 
the second half of the twentieth century than in the first. 

I confess, then, that I can find no solid grounds for Professor 
Polanyi's hopeful view that 'at the very centre of the storm, the 
tide turned', or that, because of the 'revisionist' movement that 
shook Eastern Europe In 1956, mankind generally 'has arrived 
at a point beyond nihilism ' either in the advanced free societies 
now passing through a phase of exhaustion, or in the large part 
of the world that is actually ruled in accordance with the Mes- 
sianic ideology of Communism, or in the newly emancipated 
nations now grappling with the problems of technical, intel- 
lectual and moral modernization. Yet I recognize that Polanyl, 
for all his hopeful generalizations, is far from taking an attitude 

55 



Richard Lowenthal 

of easy, passively expectant optimism, and I agree with him in 
seeing no reason for fatalistic pessimism either. Just as he warns 
that * all the logical antecedents of inversion are present today as 
they were before 5 , so do I, on the basis of my different analysis 9 
conclude that the type of social and moral crisis which has 
produced the modern secular religions still confronts many 
countries and may recur in others. But just as he sees a chance 
that mankind might learn from past disasters and, recoiling 
from ideological extremism, might 'establish a civic partnership, 
united in its resolve on continuous reform ', so do I believe that 
those dangerous crises may be avoided or surmounted without 
breaking the continuity of civilization, provided the institutional 
adjustments and the reformulations of accepted values required 
by the continuous pressure of technological and social change 
are undertaken in time. 

Yet I do not tMnk that I do Professor Polanyi an injustice if I 
retain the feeling that there remains between us some difference 
of emphasis with regard to the nature of the remedy. To him, 
the paramount need seems to be the conversion of the intellec- 
tuals from Utopian extremism to moderation, from blind trust 
in the abstract logic of theoretical systems to an appreciation of 
the value of pragmatic reforms achieved by consent. Yet if I 
try to survey the experience of those societies that have suc- 
cumbed to Messianic or satanistic ideologies in the recent past 
and to consider the problems of those that are now threatened 
by a similar fate, I am less impressed with the role of misguided 
intellectuals and more with the relentless pressure of the steadily 
accelerating change in the conditions of life. I cannot forget that 
at the start of each revolutionary crisis, the extremist intellec- 
tuals were a small and politically unimportant minority, and 
that it was generally the stubbornness of the defenders of tradi- 
tional rule and the failure of the pragmatic reformers to act with 
sufficient boldness which gave the extremists first a mass follow- 
ing and finally victory. Hence I am inclined to place the main 
emphasis in societies freshly emerging from traditional stagna- 
tion, and also in advanced societies suffering from institutional 
instability, on the need for sufficiently rapid constructive 
changes political, economic, and in the underdeveloped nations 
also cultural to retain the allegiance of the masses to a com- 
mon system of values. Nor can I believe that the necessary re- 
forms can be achieved by general consent in all circumstances, 

56 



Messianism, Nihilism and the Future 

however acute the crisis ; after all, the English settlement of 1688 
is known as the 'glorious revolution', and the tradition of con- 
tinuous reform started from that basis. 

Lest the above remarks be thought too close to the sphere of 
practical policy for a discussion of ideas, I wish to add one final 
reference to what may be called the moral conditions of contin- 
uous, pragmatic reform. I have suggested that one crucial 
condition for the undramatic course of secularization in the Pro- 
testant countries of the West has been that their moral cohesion 
has been made independent of dogmatic religious authority by 
the internalization of the moral code. Life did not cease to be 
meaningful when dogma withered away ; the sanctification of the 
daily round with all its imperfections proved a lasting alternative 
to the pursuit of the Millennium. But it seems that this spon- 
taneous moral conformity of the Nonconformists has also 
proved more amenable to further continuous chance in accord- 
ance with changing conditions, yet without an abandonment of 
basic values, than any authoritarian morality known to us. One 
of the reasons why the export of English parliamentary institu- 
tions has often proved powerless to achieve a comparable clim- 
ate of social discipline and continuous reform is evidently that it 
could not be accompanied by the simultaneous export of the 
Protestant tradition. But as human societies, however secular- 
ized or enlightened, cannot preserve their cohesion by the 
operation of rational motivations alone, I wonder whether in 
any post-authoritarian society immunity against secular relig- 
ions can be achieved without a cultural revolution that succeeds 
in establishing some such form of internalized morality. In the 
long run this may well prove one of the key conditions for the 
possibility of continuous Progress in Freedom. 



57 



Enlightenment and Radicalism 
SIDNEY HOOK 



THE field of intellectual history is beset by many difficulties. 
Primary among them is the extent to which the assump- 
tion inescapable to the very nature of the inquiry that 
history is made or determined by the ideas men hold, is true. 
Leaving aside the influence of complex objective factors of the 
physical environment, the pattern of historical events seems 
clearly to be woven out of the interacting influences of interests, 
ideas, and personality. To assign relative weights to these ele- 
ments is a delicate task. The best grounded historical accounts 
have revealed the unplausibility of all monisms even when the 
predominance of one or another factor has been established for 
a specific period. 

The difficulties of intellectual history are compounded when 
we attempt to assess the influence of philosophical ideas on 
human affairs. Here the temptation to yield to one's own 
philosophical prejudices, to use the record as an argument or 
evidence for one's own philosophical beliefs is almost over- 
whelming. But if our investigation is to rise above a disguised 
question-begging apologetic and reach conclusions which 
appear valid to inquirers of other philosophical persuasions, we 
must resist this temptation. In other words, we must regard the 
influence of philosophical ideas in history not as a philosophical 
problem but as an historical, empirical problem in principle no 
different from an inquiry into the effects of the industrial revolu- 
tion on the movement of population or the causes of the Span- 
ish-American war. 

It is from this point of view that I propose to examine Pro- 
fessor Polanyi's main thesis in his essay * Beyond Nihilism'. I 
shall then say a few things in defence of the principle of radical- 
ism which according to him threatens 'to throw us back into 
disaster' if acted upon. 

E 59 



Sidney Hook 

I 

As I understand Professor Polanyi, he Is asserting two proposi- 
tions. (1) The influence of the rationalist ideal of a secular 
society, which we associate with the Enlightenment, in fact led 
to the monstrous Bolshevik and Nazi Revolutions of the twentieth 
century. (2) The characteristic doctrines and practices of mod- 
ern totalitarianism or nihilism are 'logical consequences' of this 
rationalist ideal, particularly in its naturalist forms. 

With respect to the first thesis everything that Professor 
Polanyi says seems to me to be an illustration of a loose form of 
the post hoc.propter hoc fallacy. I do not find any valid evidence 
to support the view that the rationalist and universal humanistic 
ideals of the Enlightenment played any decisive role in the 
theory and practice of the architects of the Communist and Nazi 
Revolutions. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence 
against this view. 

Indeed, Professor Polanyi himself confronted by the fact that 
the ideals of Locke and Bentham, imported into France with 
such allegedly disastrous consequences, helped In England and 
the United States to create an unprecedented, humane welfare 
economy, not even approached by any religious culture of the 
past, explains this in terms of the moderating effect of existing 
institutions. Without examining the truth of the specific asser- 
tions made on what institutions in England and in the United 
states prevented 'the self-destructive implications of the En- 
lightenment' from being realized, such recognition is Inad- 
missible on the part of any point of a view, such as Professor 
Polanyi's, which ascribes decisive historical importance to 
philosophical ideas. For it can be argued with equal logic that 
what explains the difference between the development of Anglo- 
American liberalism and the development of European totali- 
tarianism is not the presence of the Ideals of the Enlightenment 
which were common, but the different social institutions which 
in the one case permitted the gradual social reforms to develop 
which were inherent in the commitment to the ideals of the 
Enlightenment, and in the other Inhibited them, until the 
obstructive institutions were swept away by revolution. I myself 
do not believe that this is the whole story, but historically it has 
much more to be said for it than the view that the ideals of the 
Enlightenment entailed revolutionary action. It is certainly 

60 



Enlightenment and Radicalism 

closer to the findings of those historians and sociologists who 
have called attention to the existence of authoritarian social 
structures in Germany and Russia as predisposing factors 
towards totalitarianism. 

Problems of historical causation as they relate to ideas are 
tangled enough without snarling them still more with specula- 
tions about ultimate doctrinal genealogy and influence. Empir- 
ically we must begin here with the quest for proximate causes. 
The best source books of the ideas which influenced the leaders 
of the Nazi Revolution are still Hitler's Mein Kampfznd Alfred 
Rosenberg's Der Mythos des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Hitler's 
intellectual mentor was neither Hegel, Nietzsche nor Spengler. 
It was Houston Chamberlain, whose racialist mythology, irra- 
tionalisin, and mysticism is as far as anyone can get from the 
ideals of the Enlightenment. To be sure, as Professor Polanyi 
points out, the Nazi cohorts were imbued with a consuming 
Messianic passion and zeal. But it was precisely this type of 
passion and zeal which were suspect in the eyes of the founding 
fathers of the Enlightenment. This is especially true of Locke, 
Hume, Voltaire, Bentham and the philosopher-statesmen of the 
American Republic. They distrusted 'enthusiasm' as the con- 
comitant of religious fanaticism. Rousseau's glorification of 
feeling was foreign to them, so much so that one of the standard 
criticisms of the rationalism of the Enlightenment is that the 
chill fingers of reason stifled the life of the emotions. It was not 
the martyrs of Christian piety but the legendary figures of 
Roman republican virtue which figured in these writings of the 
Enlightenment as models of excellence. 

With one proviso, it is just as far-fetched to attribute to 
the rationalism of the Enlightenment casual influence on the 
animating ideals of the leaders of the Russian October Revolu- 
tion. The Bolsheviks came to power by an historical fluke and 
in flagrant disregard of the principles of traditional Marxism. 
No one was more surprised than Lenin himself that the Bol- 
sheviks succeeded in remaining in power. In Bolshevik eyes the 
ideals of the Enlightenment were the expression par excellence 
of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois spirit and not of an inter- 
national classless society. The thinking, so to speak, was two 
intellectual epochs removed from rationalism. To the extent 
that they were Marxists, they were critical of the unhistorical 
approach of the Enlightenment, and insisted that what was 

61 



Sidney Hook 

reasonable in society could only be determined by stages in 
historical evolution which limited alternative action. To the 
extent that they were Bolsheviks, they discarded the restraining 
and moderating sense of traditional Marxism for objective limi- 
tation, for the extremist forms of voluntarism. They ruled by 
fiat and not by reason. 

From 1902 on, when Lenin wrote his Chto Delat (' What is to 
be done 5 ), it was quite clear that he had substituted for the whole 
evolutionary emphasis of Marxism the view that history could 
be transformed independently of the conditions which were pre- 
supposed by Marx, and the continuation of this point of view 
from Lenin to Krushchev seems to me to indicate the degree to 
which this departure is marked. Consequently I regard the 
theoretical leaders of the Bolshevik revolution not so much as 
the executives of the legacy of the French Revolution or of the 
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, as its executioners, so 
to speak. It was an emphasis upon will, rather than intelligence 
or reason. 

All this aside, it is controvertible that the twist which Euro- 
pean socialism under the leadership of German Social Demo- 
cracy gave to historical materialism, far from encouraging the 
dynamic and activistic tendencies in Marxism, tamed them, and 
substituted the inevitability of gradualism for the inevitability of 
violent revolution. For them the ripeness not the readiness was 

all so much so that on occasions conditions were permitted to 

become so rotten-ripe that the maggots of totalitarianism found 
a favourable environment to develop. The socialist revisionism 
of Bernstein in Germany and Jaures in France stressed the ideals 
of the Enlightenment not in order to encourage more revolu- 
tionary action, but to make the socialist movement aware of its 
actual reformist practices and to liberate it from its revolution- 
ary phrasemongery which frightened off possible electoral allies. 
When Socialist Parties were in power in Europe, their error lay 
not in too much planning but in too little, not in a bold ration- 
ality to remake society but in the timed improvisation of a 
series of holding operations to preserve a chaotic status quo. 

The chief causes of the Bolshevik and Nazi Revolutions have 
very little to do with doctrinal beliefs. They are to be found in 
the First World War and its consequences. Not 1789 but 1914 
deserves the title of the Year of the Second Fall of Man. 

The Bolsheviks got their opportunity not by invoking the 

62 



Enlightenment and Radicalism 

rationalist Ideals of the Enlightenment but by exploiting the 
hunger of the Russian masses for peace, and the desire of 
sensitive minds everywhere to liberate the world from the insane 
folly of a war whose real issues had far more to do with ques- 
tions of national prestige and economic hegemony than with the 
issues of democracy and freedom. Looking back at the fateful 
days In which the names of Lenin and Trotsky were practically 
unknown outside of small circles in Russia, Kerensky Is con- 
vinced that his major error was that he did not take Russia out 
of the war after the Kornilov revolt. The reason that Churchill 
was unable to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle was that it rallied 
to its banner in the early years supporters who were unified not 
by Marxist doctrine or ideology, but only by their opposition to 
war. In every country where the Communist movement gained a 
foothold, it began as an anti-war movement. The favourite 
rationalization of the tender-minded supporters of Commun- 
ism, when the news of Bolshevik terror seeped through to the 
West, was that the price of revolution was small compared to 
the holocaust of another world war which could be avoided only 
In a socialist world. 

Indeed, if the leaders of the International socialist movement 
had been fired with a touch of the audacity of the great figures of 
the French Revolutionary movement instead of being caught 
up In the hysteria of nationalism, they might have succeeded, if 
not in preventing the First World War, then in shortening it. 

There Is no agreement among historians on how to weigh the 
causes of the rise to power of German National Socialism. The 
inflation and economic depression, resentment at the Treaty of 
Versailles, the desire of the industrialists to curb Social Democ- 
racy and the trade-unions, the Communist theory of social- 
fascism and collaboration with the Nazis, the failure of the 
Allies to make the concessions to the Weimar Republic which 
they subsequently made to Hitler all played an incomparably 
greater role than the witches' brew of doctrine not one of 
whose elements were new with which the Nazis intoxicated 
themselves. The Nazis proudly regarded themselves in a rare 
moment of truthfulness as 'the counter-revolution' to the ideals 
of eighteenth-century Enlightenment. 



63 



Sidney Hook 

II 

I now turn to the second of Professor Polanyi's theses which 
asserts that the ideals of the Enlightenment are inherently 
unstable and logically entail the nihilism of totalitarian belief 
and practice. This assertion resembles the contentions of 
Toynbee and Maritain that if one does not worship God, 
one must worship either Stalin or Hitler or some other human 
being. 

There are two initial difficulties in any such position. First, 
even if there were a logical connection between certain philo- 
sophical premises and certain conclusions that have a potential 
bearing on conduct, this relationship alone would be no warrant 
for asserting that human beings in fact are guided by it. This is 
particularly true if the relationship is exhibited in a complicated 
chain of reasoning. Men are notoriously slack in their reasoning 
and have a livelier sense of the uses to which they can put 
doctrines than of their strict implications. To imagine that they 
guide themselves in crucial situations by the logic of their 
premises and assumptions of which they are often blissfully 
unaware is to impute a rationality to them which exceeds the 
claims of most secular rationalists in history. 

Second, as Professor Polanyi uses the word 'rationalism', it 
is an umbrella term which covers a variety of doctrines and 
thinkers. If we speak of 'sceptical rationalism' then we must 
exclude Locke who believed that moral truths were as certain as 
those of mathematics. If we speak of 'absolute and inalienable 
rights' then we must exclude Bentham who regarded the lang- 
uage of the Declaration of Independence as 'nonsense on stilts'. 
If we speak of Voltaire and Hume, then we must exclude the 
romanticism of Rousseau. Professor Polanyi speaks of all these 
tendencies and figures as integral to the culture-complex of the 
Enlightenment despite the fact that in some relevant and impor- 
tant respects they differ more among themselves than some of 
them do from the early Burke and the later Hegel (whose 
Rechtsphilosophie, for example, borrows heavily from Rous- 
seau). Nowhere does Professor Polanyi give us a clear statement 
of what he takes the essential doctrines of the Enlightenment to 
be. In one place he suggests that the rationalism of Voltaire and 
Gibbon might have fulfilled the hopes of man for a civilized 
society had they not been blighted by 'Christian fervour'. Does 

64 



Enlightenment and Radicalism 

this mean that rationalism was at fault in being too tepid in its 
critique of Christian fanaticism, too tolerant of the spirit of 
intolerance? Or does it mean that any doctrine held with a zeal 
and passion disproportionate to the evidence of experience 
threatens to unleash the furies of totalitarianism? Then why 
make the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which sought to 
instate the self-critical processes of reason or intelligence as the 
supreme authority of truth in human affairs, and as the supreme 
arbiter of the inescapable conflicts among human values, the 
scapegoat of historical disasters like war and revolution which 
flowed in large part from a refusal to deal intelligently with their 
social causes? 

It is obvious from the foregoing that I see nothing calamitous 
in returning to the ideals of the Enlightenment if, indeed, we 
are returning to them, which, as I read the evidence, is more of a 
hope than a fact. But whatever the fact, I for one believe we 
should return to the secular rationalism of the Enlightenment. 
When I say we should 'return', I mean, of course, return with 
the difference that the growth of knowledge and the perspective 
of broad experience make to minds capable of learning from the 
past. We can now distinguish more clearly between what is per- 
enni ally valid in the approach of eighteenth-century rationalism 
and its local or aberrant forms. 

What we have learned about the logic of modern science, the 
patterns of scientific methods, and the findings of modern 
psychology should immunize us against the easy optimism of the 
past, whose secular forms, we note in passing, never rivalled the 
stupendous myths with which religion consoled believers. It 
should enable us to develop those habits of reasonable expecta- 
tion which are the hall-marks of a mature outlook on man and 
history. Modem science suggests to us that we do not have to 
embrace a sterile scepticism because the certainties of absolu- 
tism are no longer available to us, that reliable knowledge about 
human affairs although difficult is obtainable. It suggests that 
there are always problems, small problems and large problems, 
but not one great problem to which a final or total solution can 
be found. It suggests that like scientific inquiry in any field, 
intelligent social inquiry is a continuous process, and, as in 
science, that it is easier to agree on the empirical consequences 
of proposed courses of conduct than on their alleged presuppo- 
sitions. It suggests that in human affairs history and tradition are 

65 



Sidney Hook 

inescapably relevant and are at least as Important as other 
technical factors which enter into the costs of innovation. 

What we have learned from modern psychology is more vague 
but just as pertinent. It reinforces the wisdom of relating values 
and ideals to human interests and of exposing these interests to 
critical consciousness and the counter claims by which they may 
be controlled. It suggests that values which are not felt as actual 
or possible fulfilment of needs can find no purchase in the 
business of living and run the risk of becoming mealy-mouthed 
abstractions that conceal our real commitments. Together with 
all the other social disciplines, it suggests that where there are no 
shared interests there will be no common values, that the first 
step in approaching conflicts of interest after laying them bare, 
is to mediate between them, to correct, modify, invent or dis- 
cover the social devices or institutional forms by which they can 
be made viable. It suggests that we be suspicious of our own 
zeal and selfrighteousness, that we cultivate our powers of 
imaginative perception in order to see more clearly the human 
being in the enemy, and to understand that since a sound posi- 
tion may be defended by unsound arguments, we have an 
obligation to rethink claims which, because of the paltry reasons 
offered in support of them, we sometimes reject out of hand. 

If this approach is taken we may find that we accomplish 
more by trying to achieve less. But whatever we try to achieve 
will require more thought, more planning, experiment and con- 
trolled improvisation than secular rationalists have attempted in 
the past. There is no royal road to social justice and social peace 
because, among other reasons, there are so many occasions on 
which they conflict. A respect for history does not always enjoin 
caution upon us. Over-cautious drivers can be just as much of a 
road hazard as speed demons. Some historical situations have 
degenerated into chaos because those in a position to act have 
played it too safe. They have relied more upon the automatic, 
allegedly self-regulating tendencies of society or upon the happy 
chance that something will turn up than upon their creative 
intelligence for which, despite all its limitations, there is no 
substitute. 

As I understand radicalism in social life it is continuous reli- 
ance upon the methods of critical intelligence, or of scientific 
method in its most comprehensive sense, to negotiate conflicts 
of value in the hope of finding or discovering shared interests 

66 



be equitably enjoyed. Such methods cannot create 
values, they can only check or test or appraise them in the light of 
the best available knowledge of their causes and consequences 
in experience. The fruitfulness of this approach is to be meas- 
ured not only by its results but by the consequences of alterna- 
tive approaches. It does not accept Russell's dictum, that there is 
no such thing as an irrational goal or end except one impossible 
of fulfilment. For when we examine goals or ends in their actual 
problematic context, we shall find that they are never realy final 
or ultimate. They are both ends and means in different contexts. 
They are, therefore, subject not only to the rationality of the 
means-end relation but to the rational control of the several 
compossible ends to which every sane mind is wedded. 

We can return to secular rationalism with confidence as a 
starting-point for fresh advance, subject to the caveats indicated 
above. Nothing promises to be more helpful in grappling with 
the problems of a scientific and technological world. Its explicit 
and implicit ideals still recommend themselves to the reason of 
free men the rule of just law nationally and internationally 
until it acquires world sovereignty, universal and continuous 
education, the primacy of the individual, not of individualism, 
in the social process, growth as a qualitative norm of develop- 
ment rather than some fixed, pre-determined end, the refusal to 
make politics autonomous of morals and morals autonomous 
of social and economic life. These ideals still retain validity for 
our own day and time as guides to programme and policy. If we 
go beyond them, it will be by following the vision they have 
inspired. If we repudiate them, we once more fling wide open the 
doors to the furies of nihilism. 



67 






MICHAEL POLANYI : . . . the alternatives before us . . . 

I wish to thank Professor Hook very sincerely for his contri- 
bution. It offers a complete counterpart to my own suggestions. 
In my opinion, or interpreted within my framework, his 
position would be one of suspended logic. Now, since this is my 
ideal, I can hardly reproach him for upholding it. The taking for 
granted of all the humanistic and moral limitations which he 
referred to in his report would probably have exactly the effect 
which he expects, namely to restore reason to a position which is 
altogether beneficent in the way it has been beneficent for long 
periods of rationalist rule in its utilitarian form, and still re- 
mains so in many countries. But I still see two alternatives 
before us : whether to accept that these limitations are inherent 
in rationalism, or to think that they arise from some other 
source from tradition, from patriotism, from religion. If the 
latter is the case, then rationalism can only be described as a 
limited anchorage. 

Now I will ask a few of our participants who have themselves 
recently experienced, not only the movement towards totali- 
tarianism but also the revulsion from it, whether they feel that 
this kind of analysis is relevant or whether they would suggest 
something else in addition to what has been said. 

PAUL IGNOTUS: . . . Irrational rationalists . . 

Our friend Arthur Koestler, in his books Darkness at Noon and 
The Yogi and the Commissar., considers the Communist ideol- 
ogy as a sort of rationalism a outrance. His Communists are 
people who trust reason absolutely, in fact, he would perhaps 
admit, to quite an irrational extent. Perhaps Communists are, in 
fact, 'irrational rationalists'? I am sure that at the cradle of the 
French Revolution one can already find rationalism a outrance 

69 



Criticism and Discussion 

combined with, a sort of irrationalism, with passionate sentimen- 
talism and belief in instincts. 

As far as Fascism and Nazism had any philosophy at ail, they 
believed in violence, in force, in anything but reason. In the case 
of Communists, their vision of history was to some extent drawn 
up on rational lines, but all the slogans they launched, their 
passionate attacks were always justified on irrational grounds, 
through heroism, self-sacrifice. 

I never understood, for instance, why Communists should 
think it is a glorious thing to sacrifice one's life, and I agree 
with Professor Polanyi that there is an irrational, inordinate 
moral passion behind this pseudo-rational creed. 

Now, to turn to Hungarian revisionism. I am a revisionist 
only in a very old sense, let us say sympathetic to those social- 
democrats who used to be called revisionists before the First 
World War ; but, as we know, the term was suddenly applied 
by Krushchev to deviating Communists and I think it mainly 
applies to them, though one may include among them people 
who do not come directly from Communist circles. 

I just want to tell you this : our revisionist leaders were either 
politicians or writers. A politician like Imre Nagy thought, up 
to his last moment, that he was an honest Leninist and he really 
felt that Lenin had supplied all those elements of humanitarian- 
ism for which he stood up against Rakosi and the Russian quis- 
lings. I do not think that he would ever have thought of going 
back on those teachings. It was different with the writers who 
followed him and were Ms friends, for instance Tibor Dery. 
Dery, from his early youth and throughout the whole of Ms 
literary career, was a man who really disbelieved all sorts of 
general ideas. As far as I could see, what attracted him to 
Communism was its huge ambitions. It was his experience 
which made him believe (and this to a large extent confirms 
Professor Polanyi's thesis) that some simple sort of moral truth 
such as brotherly love, such as decency, couldn't be done away 
with, and that everything loses its sense if one doesn't observe 
and respect and try to serve these truths. This feeUng was pre- 
valent amongst leading Hungarian revisionists and thus, in 
spite of all their revolutionary upbringing, there was in them an 
important element of traditionalism and an inclination to 
vindicate traditional moral values. 

70 



Criticism and Discussion 

K. A. JELENSKI: , . . a genuine form of Marxism . . . 

Is the 'recoil from moral inversion 5 the main characteristic of 
Polish revisionism? Before the war, only very few Polish writers 
or intellectuals were revolutionaries in the sense that Tibor Dery 
and other Hungarian intellectuals were. The adherence of part 
of the Polish intelligentsia to Communism occurred after the 
Communists were brought to power by the advance of the Red 
Army. They were not revolutionary intellectuals, they were 
neophytes who accepted the reigning creed, the religion of the 
Prince. The ambiguity with which they tried to rationalize their 
adherence is best described in Czeslaw Milosz's book The 
Captive Mind. 

The real believers were to be found only among some young 
intellectuals, who came of age under the Stalinist regime. What 
they revolted against after Krushchev's secret speech was the 
regime's hypocrisy. Polish revisionists wanted to restate Marx- 
ism in rationalist terms ; they were fighting the whole idealistic 
side of Stalinism I use idealistic in the Marxist derogatory 
sense. They wanted to apply rational methods to study reality ; 
their ultimate aim was to achieve a form of 'Workers' Democ- 
racy', which they thought possible on the condition of a return 
to a genuine form of Marxism. 

This of course proved impossible because of the conditions in 
which the political apparatus in a Communist country must 
keep power concentrated in its own hands. 

It is the disillusioned revisionists, who have become in fact 
social-democrats who come perhaps nearest to Professor 
Polanyi's analysis of the abatement of ideological dynamism. 

FRANCOIS FEJTO : . . . new explosions of the revisionist trend . . . 

Today is the second anniversary of the execution of Miklos 
Gimes and Imre Nagy in Budapest. Now, Miklos Gimes came 
to Paris in 1955 and it was then that I met him secretly on 
several occasions. At that time he was prey to fearful doubts; 
it was before the 20th Congress of the Party; everything 
he believed in had crumbled beneath his feet and conversation 
with him was painful. He did not even know what he was going 
to do and it was only after much hesitation that he decided to 
return to Hungary. But he did decide to do so and before he left 

71 



Criticism and Discussion 

he came to tell me that he felt he had many things to make good, 
even if it cost him his life. He was ready then, in 1955, to lay 
down his life in order to open people's eyes to the truth. He 
thought that during his years of serving Rakosi as diplomatic 
editor of the official organ of the Party, Szabad Nep, he had 
made so many mistakes,, committed so many crimes and sinned 
so greatly against the Holy Ghost, so to speak, that he had to 
pay for it. It was in him that I observed how deeply ingrained in 
certain intellectuals was that moral sense analysed by Professor 
Polanyi. It was stronger, of course, in those Communists who 
were Christians and who like Gimes, became Communists after 
the Second World War, for moral reasons, because they really 
thought that Communism alone, independently of Russian in- 
tervention, could bring about the recovery of a nation so tho- 
roughly corrupted by the Horthy regime and the amoral Fas- 
cism of the Nazis, 

Among Hungarian intellectuals there are many such men, for 
whom Communism was not a career but a means of reforming 
their country. In 1955 and 1956 they were the ones most affected 
emotionally and their moral faith was much stronger, in reaction 
to their earlier beliefs and actions, than that of other intellec- 
tuals such as the * populists', in Hungary, who resembled in 
some ways the earlier Russian Narodniks, although the popu- 
lists were never so deeply committed to the regime. While 
working with the Communist regime, they always had certain 
reservations. For example, I think that my friend Ignotus, 
although he had been in prison and suffered persecution, on 
being released when the thaw set in in Hungary, remained much 
more moderate, more cautious and more realistic in his reaction 
to events than his Communist or ex-Communist colleagues or 
the revisionists among the leaders of the Authors' Union. 

Professor Polanyi's main theory seems to me to be that there 
is a sort of perverted moral sense in Stalinism and in Com- 
munism in general. I think this theory is indisputable and that it 
would be worthwhile drawing conclusions from it in relation to 
Marxism, since it is Marxism and MarxismLeninism which, 
after the defeat of revisionism, of the revisionist movements, 
continues to form the minds of young intellectuals in the East, 
but by the same ideological and mental processes thus providing 
these elements with new opportunities for new revolts. Some of 
my friends think of revisionism as a movement conditioned by 

72 



Criticism and Discussion 

the period and limited in time. They believe that since its defeat 
In 1956 its days are numbered and that revisionism has no future 
in Eastern Europe. I am of the opposite opinion. In which I 
share the view of the Communists themselves. I think that it is 
most significant that, one year after the utter defeat of the revi- 
sionists as a political movement, the Communist Parties meeting 
in Moscow should have adopted a resolution in which, after 
much discussion, they described revisionism as the chief danger 
to international Communism, And it is even more significant 
that this directive, namely 'Revisionism* Enemy No, r should 
still be one of the chief subjects of Communist propaganda. 
You will agree that this gives one pause, when one thinks that 
on the one hand the main revisionist leaders in Hungary have 
been executed, while others are In prison and the revisionist 
movement has no means of expression in Poland, in Hungary or 
anywhere else. The Communists that is to say the Chinese, 
who are the most extreme Communists think that only Yugo- 
slavs survive among former revisionists. But Yugoslav revision- 
ism is, I think, quite a different matter as it consists in the 
quarrel between the extremist elements of the international 
Communist movement and the Yugoslavs, I am convinced that 
Marxism-Leninism as it is after its victory over revisionism in 
1956 has reached an ideological impasse. While it deprives the 
revisionist elements of any possibility of expression in the press, 
we constantly see It making considerable concessions, at least on 
minor points, to the revisionists, and it is my opinion that in a 
few more years, when young people, students and intellectuals 
have got over the defeat of 1956, in view of the inertia of 
Stalinism, the same causes will produce the same effects and we 
may well see new explosions, of an intellectual kind at least, of 
the revisionist trend. 

HANS KOHN: ... a long period of spiritual preparation , . . 

On one point I am in full agreement with Mr. Polanyi, namely 
in his insistence on the decisive influence of moral factors in all 
totalitarian movements. I am among those who believe that 
even in Nazism not in Hitler, but in Nazi youth in Fascism 
and in Communism there is much moral idealism, if of a per- 
verted kind. But above all I would like to support Professor 
Hook's first point. It seems to me quite impossible for a historian 

73 



Criticism and Discussion 

to regard the Enlightenment as responsible for the rise of 
totalitarianism. On the contrary, It was the decline of the 
Enlightenment which made Communism and Fascism possible. 
The Enlightenment means the end of authoritarianism, the end 
of dogmatism and Intolerance. Those are the three essential 
features of the Enlightenment and in that sense the totalitarian 
movements are in opposition to It rather than its consequences. 
Why have some countries, such as England and Switzerland, 
been less subject to totalitarianism than, shall we say, Spain, 
Germany or Russia? Because in Spain, Germany and Russia, 
the Enlightenment was already being combated and defeated in 
the eighteenth century ; because the Slavophiles in Russia, the 
Germanophiles in Germany and the reactionaries In Spain 
opposed the Enlightenment and thereby prepared the ground 
for the victory of Communism and Fascism, which did not 
emerge by chance in those countries, but were the outcome of a 
long period of spiritual preparation on the part of the intellec- 
tuals. Here again I agree with Professor Polanyi that the intelli- 
gentsia has much to answer for, the Intellectuals have a great re- 
sponsibility, the mteUectuaMn Germany from as far back as 1812, 
and in increasing numbers, the intellectuals in Russia, the Slavo- 
philes and others who, by their contempt for Western enlighten- 
ment, prepared the ground for the new totalitarian regimes. 

MICHAEL POLANYI: . . . the path to self-destruction . . . 

The point we are discussing is to my mind not whether the 
Enlightenment was the direct inspiration of Hitler and Lenin. 
It certainly was not, and I am accordingly in full agreement with 
the speakers who said so. What I have said was, in short, that the 
defeat of the Enlightenment was the logical consequence of an 
Inherent weakness and that is the point on which we must 
concentrate if we are to think of the future. Enlightenment had 
indeed lost considerable ground and had already set foot on the 
path to self-destruction on the short path that leads from 
Voltaire to Rousseau and from Rousseau to Auguste Comte, 
who already foreshadowed the modem tyranny of political 
theory based on scientific premises. I have not been the first to 
make this point, but I insist that we must discuss it here if we 
wish to know where to look for inspiration in the past. 

I have said in my essay that I see the present generation 

74 



looking back to the Ideals of the eighteenth century, but that I 
was not sure whether this looking back would really lead to any 
sound course of action. And we are here to discover how, with 
our greater insight, we can help this generation. 



SALVADOR BE MADARIAGA! . . the hypocrisy ofthe West . . . 

I am in agreement with all those who have established the con- 
nection between rationalism and irrationalism. We all know 
that we are only dealing in words and that actual life is made of 
human beings : irrationalists are apt to be very rational and there 
is a very odd irrationalism about rationalists. Communism is a 
religious attitude today and it is very difficult to consider Com- 
munism as merely the outcome of rationalistic Enlightenment 
rooted in the eighteenth century. In my experience, I have found 
that rationalism has entered into the composition of events that 
we are now witnessing in a particularly odd way, in that pre- 
cisely because of its very beauty, its simplicity, its perfection, it 
has expected too much and has called forth, a great deal of 
frustration. I should have thought that a tremendous lot of the 
trouble we have suffered particularly in Europe in the last 
twenty years was due to the terrible frustration caused by the too 
high hopes that had been put on the League of Nations, I should 
have thought also that the too high hopes based on the modern 
state have led to a similar frustration. The biggest frustration of 
all was of course due to the fact that the biggest revolution of all, 
the one brought about in Moscow in 1917, had ended in the 
appalling failure of 1925 and onwards. 

A good deal of frustration is also due to the fact that those 
who remained free, or at least outside the failures of the Bol- 
shevik revolution, have not come up to expectation either. Hypo- 
crisy is, it seems to me, the hallmark of international life in the 
West, although, it is administered by those who consider them- 
selves as the representatives of rationalism. 

Whenever we think of violence, we very naturally are led to 
imagine it as active violence, but the contemporary world is 
absolutely saturated by passive violence, that is to say, people 
who are powerful enough to sit tight on the wrong which they 
know they have caused. Now, a good deal of this sitting tight 
on your wrongs is being liquidated, for instance in Africa and, 
to a certain extent, in Asia. But it isn't altogether got rid offer a 

p 75 



Criticism and Discussion 

number of reasons, one of which is that this issue of nationalism 
and sovereignty requires a good deal of airing in public in such 
places as ours where this can be done in a serene sort of way, 
The trouble is not merely nationalism, which is forcing many 
Western governments to a position of hypocrisy ; the trouble is 
an insufficient amount of sovereignty. We are all the time re- 
minded that we can only organize the world in a new phase if 
people give away their sovereignty, while most nations haven't 
got any sovereignty to give away ; I am not merely speaking of 
such places as Liberia, or Albania, or Panama, or Guatemala, 
whose sovereignty is practically non-existent; I am speaking of 
the sovereignty of the United States, Is the United States really 
sovereign? Are there not in the United States powers that are 
more powerful than the people of the United States? That is 
what I want to know, and therefore, since the nations, even 
within themselves, have not been able to achieve their own self- 
possession, how could we expect them to behave in international 
affairs so as to satisfy rationalists? There must be a conflict 
there, an inner conflict in the nation which is bound to produce 
all kinds of trouble including hypocrisy. 

PIETER GEYL: . , . our strength must be in self-confidence . . . 

To represent the French Revolution as having brought to an end 
a political state common to mankind for a hundred thousand 
years as Professor Polanyi seems to do has to my ears a 
thoroughly unhistoric sound. It was far from being so entirely 
novel an event, it resulted from slow-working changes, both in 
social conditions and in ways of thinking, that had gone on for 
centuries and which were by no means confined to France and it 
did not effect so complete a change either. The enlightened 
despots had shown a lot of social dynamism before the French 
Revolution, and after it there remained a lot of statism, of cling- 
ing to old habits, of respect for tradition, of distrust towards 
reforming rationalism. The sharp dividing line which Polanyi 
draws between England and France, or even between England 
and the Continent, is to my mind equally unjustifiable. He re- 
marks that continental Marxists kept on discussing the curious 
backwardness of British and American politics. But just look at 
continental socialists long before this beneficent change that 
Polanyi sees in the fifties. Socialism there could not be simply 

76 



Criticism and Discussion 

equated with Marxism, in France I mention Jaures, a truly 
democratic idealist, only remember Ms action in the Dreyfus 
case, and as for Holland but let me first quote what Polanyi 
says about the doctrine in which France,, according to him, led 
the world (except the Anglo-Saxon countries). s If society is not a 
divine institution, it is made by man and man is free to do with 
society as he likes/ Now this is a doctrine that was rejected by a 
large majority of Dutch public opinion all through the nine- 
teenth century, There were to begin with the parties based on 
positive Christian creeds^ the orthodox Protestants and the 
Catholics the present Dutch Government, by the way, mainly 
rests on those two but also Thorbecke the great liberal re- 
former, the author of the Constitution of 1848, admitted exclu- 
sively and emphatically the restraints imposed by history, The 
Dutch Socialist Party altered its programme in 1937 already, in a 
non-Marxist sense, so much so that I, just back in my own 
country, after twenty-two years stay in England, seriously 
thought of joining it. When I did join it, immediately after the 
Liberation of Holland in May 1945, 1 explained my decision by 
describing the party as the last refuge for a Liberal. As for the 
change of temper and mentality in the Communist world as a 
result of the debunking of Stalin and of the Hungarian rebellion, 
I am not sure that Professor Polanyi is not over-optimistic here, 
and at any rate, when he talks of the change in the East as being 
in one line with that decline of dynamic ideology in the West that 
he wants us to believe took place in the last decade, I cannot 
follow him. I grant him* that a reawakened national feeling had 
something to do with the restoration of humane ideals in Russia, 
or with the attempts in that direction, as I should prefer to put it 
with the changes in Poland and Hungary. But above all, how is 
it possible to argue as if before the fifties the two situations in 
Russia and in Western Europe were, I should no doubt unduly 
assess Professor Polanyi' s meaning if I said, identical, but even 
comparable? How is it possible to write that 'we' we of the 
West, Polanyi seems to mean, although perhaps I should read 
*we' on both sides of the Iron Curtain that we have arrived 
beyond nihilism today, and then to discuss the creative possi- 
bilities by which man may discover an avenue which will not 
lead back to nihilism? Lead back, as if we had ever been there. 
The most sober pragmatical attitude towards public affairs, so 
Professor Polanyi writes, which has spread since 1950 through 

77 



Criticism and Discussion 

England and America., Germany and Austria, reproduces in its 
repudiation of ideological strife, the attitude of Voltaire and the 
Encyclopedists towards religious bigotry. I remark in passing 
that Voltaire and the Encyclopedists displayed in their repudia- 
tion a fervour and an animosity which was not always either 
sober or pragmatical. Becker's striking phrase about the 'heav- 
enly city of the eighteenth-century French philosophers 5 
comes, I should think, nearer to the mark. 

It is my conviction that our civilization, full of imperfections, 
as it no doubt is, was, long before the fifties, and still is, the 
home, par excellence, of free discussion and independent thought 
and that we have lived for quite a while and still live under 
the outside stress of an expansionist and dynamic ideology. 
Our strength must be before all in self-confidence, which does 
not mean that we must be blind to our weaknesses ; but the 
moral reserves of democracy are considerable and we must not 
forget that. 

MICHIO TAKEYAMA: ...the overwhelming 'modern civilization 

My country Japan waged a war that lasted for fourteen 
years. All the virtues stored up in the course of history were 
called upon for the purposes of fighting that war, but amid 
exceptional difficulties everything was corrupted in the end. 

The present wave of anti- American feeling, led by the active 
minority, which suddenly became violent a month ago is not an 
expression of nationalism ; it is prompted by the demand for 
peace. We are experiencing modern nihilism in the form of 
national schizophrenia, due to over-rapid, unsystematic mod- 
ernization of society. People have lost their roots. Moderniza- 
tion began with the slogan 'The Japanese soul, with European 
technique'. But modernization has sapped the traditional 
Japanese qualities. 

When we consider what is now happening in China, we can 
say, all the same, that Japan has managed to absorb the over- 
whelming modern civilization without losing too much of its 
own nature. To us Japanese it seems as though other Asian and 
African countries were trying to do at one fell swoop what 
we took a hundred years to do. One must hope that other 
countries will gain what we have gained without losing what we 
have lost. Japan gained its independence and made its ascent in 

78 



Criticism 

a period of the most barefaced imperialism ; whereas nowadays 
the highly-developed countries are helping the others. Europe 
and are ready to the Asian and African countries. 

That is noble, I would like to make sure, as well, 

those countries will develop systematically from the spiritual 
point of view too, looking at the whole problem not only from 
the angle of historical ideas, but from the psychological angle as 
wel. Psychology plays a very important part in a country during 
periods of transition. To take an example, propaganda from the 
niMlistic-radical side is always up-to-date and psychologically 
captivating; whereas the propaganda from the side of reason is 
always outdated and unpsychological. 

THEODOR LITT: . . . no country has more important reasons . . . 

What I observed in Germany in the critical years is that so- 
called irrationalism and rationalism went contrary to their own 
programme and formed the most amazing alliances. To go back 
to the days of National Socialism, we saw a characteristic ex- 
ample of the peculiar mixture of these elements among National 
Socialist youth and students. On the one hand, Mr. Polanyi is 
certainly right when, among the forerunners of National 
Socialism, he attributes an important place to Romanticism. 
There is no doubt that these young people believed that, in some 
romantic way, in and through them, the best of Germany's past 
would come to life again. I remember that at the time one of the 
Nazi leaders published an article entitled 'Back to the primeval 
forest'. A critic of the Nazis once said that these young men were 
behaving like cave-men and one of the Nazi spokesmen took 
this up enthusiastically and said * Yes, the primeval forest of the 
cave-man is coming to life in us. We are reawakening man's 
primitive instincts. We are there to bring instinct into its own as 
against degenerate intellectualism.' But when it was a matter of 
transferring this primitive instinct to political life, then aE at 
once it became rationalism of the purest vintage. And they were 
convinced that these original impulses could be led to decisive 
victory in the context of a rationalistic social order, without ever 
pausing to wonder whether by contact with these rationalistic 
principles the original instincts would not be to some extent dis- 
torted or even lost. 

On the other hand, I have been long enough in the East zone 

79 



Criticism and Discussion 

to have seen the early beginnings of Communism there and to 
have observed that the spokesmen on the German side, whose 
desire it was gradually to bring mankind to a state of perfection, 
were convinced that once one had embarked on the Communist 
way of life and adopted the Communist economy it was abso- 
lutely certain to lead to a classless society and bring back Para- 
dise on earth. But when one examined the basic motives of these 
men, it was simply an innate belief in what was given out as 
scientific fact. It is quite true that Communism owes its success 
to the fact that on the one hand it claims to be based on scientific 
premises and on the other it is capable of arousing fanatical 
enthusiasm in the breasts of those who wish to make it a reality. 
And so once again we have a combination of rational argument 
and irrational faith which make up the essential strength of 
Communism. Of course, when we Germans of today look at the 
situation as a whole and compare our experience, in the East 
zone at least, of both kinds of totalitarian systems, we naturally 
wonder what present-day Germany has learnt from this experi- 
ence and whether it is desirous or capable of building a new 
social order. It is my impression -that two widely-held beliefs 
stand in the way of a truly democratic society. There are those 
who would have us believe that, as regards freedom, the differ- 
ence between the Soviet-occupied zone and the Federal Repub- 
lic is only one of degree. They say that in fact freedom is re- 
stricted in both places in different ways and that careful scrutiny 
would show that in the West too people are cheated of their 
freedom by various means, such as the press and the radio, just 
as they are in the East by the police and propaganda. But that 
means that people fail to realize that our democracy has at least 
the overriding advantage of allowing free expression of opinion, 
even if it is sometimes wrong. Among the opponents of our 
Western democracy there are indeed many who do not reflect 
for one instant that they themselves enjoy the privilege of being 
able to speak up as loud as they like without fearing any unfor- 
tunate consequences. I do not think that people realize enough 
that freedom and democracy are still at home with us in the 
West. Then there are the others and this is a most dangerous 
attitude which I have heard exists also in other Western coun- 
tries there are the others who ask what is the point of making 
all this fuss about freedom. We have it already and we take it 
for granted. 

80 



Criticism and Discussion 

Totalitarian systems such as Communism take a detenninist 
view of history. They are convinced that progress will bring the 
world inevitably to the final goal of classless society. If we think 
of the extensive influence that the determinist concept of science 
has on the whole of our existence and of the certainty with which 
people claim that everything in our spiritual life, in society, 
government and history is determined as precisely as the pro- 
cesses of what we call nature, then we realize how rightly Mr. 
Polanyi, in his essay on the two cultures, points out that as long 
as the scientific concept of man is as widespread as it still is with 
us and clearly is on the other side, the individual will not awaken 
to Ms responsibilities in relation to history and to his social 
environment. I must also agree with Mr. Polanyi when he points 
out the need to mobilize moral forces in the defence of demo- 
cratic freedom. Speaking from my own experience in Germany, 
I would say that no country has more important reasons than 
Germany to impress on the minds of the rising generation how 
important a free democratic regime is in the general pattern of 
human life. As Germans we have an educational task to 
accomplish of which nobody can relieve us and in which we are 
sincerely grateful for all the help other countries can give us. 



81 



PART II 

Prospects for a New Civility 



A Rehabilitation of Nationalism? 
HERBERT LUTHY 



NATIONALISM belongs to those political concepts which 
are at once impractical and indispensable. All dis- 
cussions on nationalism in general are marked by the 
proliferous and glittering sterility characteristic of discussions of 
undefined and indefinable subjects, such as those on the spiritual 
archetypes as defined in C. G. Jung's psychology, both un- 
limited in numbers and indescribable in essentials, but the 
muffled existence of which, in the unconscious appears to be 
evident. This comparison is not arbitrary, for we, also, are deal- 
ing with the shadowy realm of collective psychology, which 
eludes rational consciousness. Every attempted definition of 'the 
nation', 'the nationalist idea' or 'national feeling' ends in 
mysticism or mystification ; it can only be expressed in images 
and symbols flags, myths, totem animals, folklore, cults, rites 
representing a sense of belonging to one collective body of 
individuals essentially different from individuals of any other 
collective body which is rationally inexpressible. From the 
nationalist point of view the nation is the embodiment of a 
higher order 'directly linked with God', with its own soul, will, 
consciousness and mission, and of which the essence is incom- 
prehensible to all other peoples, or, also, in psychological inver- 
sion, one's own nation is the 'universal' or 'humanity's nation', 
all other peoples being barbarians or sub-human, i.e. the 
anomaly sets itself up as the sole norm. (With certain typical 
differences this was the pattern of both French and German 
nationalism, and one would not have to dig very deeply to find 
similar claims in other forms of nationalism.) Nationalism is not 
a generic term ; we may analyse one form of nationalism in a]! 
its conscious concepts and manifestations and yet not learn the 
least thing about other kinds of nationalism, all and each of 
which claim to be radically different from all others, and unique. 

85 



If we to a generally valid definition of 

nationalism, we are left but a of negations : 

the of universalism, the equality, and of 

the human ratio. 

It appeals conceptually, nationalism can only stand for 
the more or less complete and exclusive adherence to one nation* 
Historically, however and particularly in contemporary his- 
tory the process is the reverse ; nationalism creates the nation. 
A traditionally constituted population group only becomes a 
nation when it is converted to nationalism. This, reduced to its 
barest statement, is a well-known fact. The many fruitless 
attempts made during the past 150 years to find general and 
objective evidence of what could be described as forming a 
nation language, culture, customs., traditions, history (i.e. con- 
scious concepts) or else biological and territorial unity (i.e. 
blood and soil)- have in the end invariably led to the final 
definition that a nation came into being through its national 
consciousness, i.e. not by way of any particular ascertainable 
quality, but through a claim which in the final resort rests on an 
irrational basis. The fact that in the nineteenth century the term 
s nation* was applied only to certain European peoples was 
founded on a historical postulate only these peoples had a 
history of their own and national consciousness could only arise 
on the basis of such a history ; the rest of the world's population 
were 'without history' and therefore 'without consciousness'. 
In the dawn of European nationalism, when those nations that 
belonged to the German and Italian cultures, following the 
example of the older national states of Western Europe also 
formed themselves into national states, and others, like Greece, 
Hungary, Poland, which had never gone under completely, were 
fighting for their independence, the name of 'nation' was like a 
title of ennoblement belonging to certain privileged peoples, who 
possessed their own literature, traditions and history, and it then 
seemed unthinkable that national consciousness could develop 
everywhere, ad libitum. Today, this concept of 'peoples without 
a history 9 , incapable of developing any national consciousness, 
has collapsed ; all human groups have a history and if some of 
them were unaware of the fact, European colonists gave them a 
practical demonstration of it. The history of the Congo is at least 
as old and varied as that of Belgium, although the Congo started 
to produce nationalists and historians at a later date. (Every 

86 



A of Nationalism? 

nationalist is a historian, even if he be only an historical story- 
teller, retelling of a golden past.) We can record the 

4 democratization" of the concept of nationalism ('Nationalism 

for eveiyman") during more a century, via Eastern Europe 
and the Balkans to the Near East, to Asia and Africa, just as, 
from the sociological point of view, we can record the democra- 
tization of the aristocratic forms of address 6 Sir * and c Madam * ; 
it is just as natural that today the inhabitants of the Congo terri- 
tories should wish to be addressed as a nation as that they 
should desire individually to be addressed as Monsieur or 
Madame, and this is not so much the expression of 'otherness* 
as a claim to equality. The triumph of nationalism is at one and 
the same time the triumph of a formula and the final exhaustion 
of a concept, and because today this concept, 'a nation \ has lost 
al distinctive meaning, we can just as easily declare at the 
breakfast-table that the heyday of nationalism is over, and at 
supper-time, that the unremitting advance of nationalism is the 
hall-mark of our period ; both these statements can be supported 
by extensive dossiers and weighty arguments. Is the form of 
address, s Monsieur' or 'Madame', towards porters and washer- 
women a triumph of the aristocratic principle or a sign of its 
collapse? I do not ask this question jokingly, and I would take 
great care not to answer it lightheartedly. 

During the past century we have become so familiar with the 
problems involved in this 'nationalism for everyone' that it is 
superfluous to dwell on them in greater detail The perfect 
nation, comprising the unity of a territory with natural frontiers, 
language, religion, customs, culture, economic and political 
viability and social homogeneity, exists nowhere and has never 
existed, although the nations of Western Europe came relatively 
close to this ideal picture the nations of a privileged part of the 
world in which, during a thousand years, no major invasions or 
migrations disrupted or intermingled their various peoples, in 
whose more or less homogeneous societies the idea of the 
"perfect nation' could in consequence arise. Everywhere else 
as was already evident in Central Europe nationalism was 
compelled to master certain offshoots of the national character 
on which to build its claims to national independence ; either a 
linguistic group, a separate religious tradition, a folklorist pecu- 
liarity, or some other special status, even a sociological anti- 
pathy towards neighbouring groups, were sufficient as a basis on 

87 



which to a nationalistic movement. But In order to become 
a sovereign a thus constituted was obliged subse- 

quently to acquire what It still lacked, namely the characteristics 
of the perfect nation its own particular culture and past tradi- 
tion, if not Its own (such as the resuscitation of half- 
or forgotten or else the artificial construc- 
tion of into forms of literary language); its 'natural' 
territory or such as could from the military or economic points 
of view self-supporting, and last, but not least, the 
psychological unity der by means of 
which the and myths could become effective, 
and in for nationalism blindly outraged 
all the provided by geography, world economics, 
reason, history, and co-existence, The tragedy of Eastern 
us the law of reproduction by means of which 
like infusoria, propagate themselves by splitting, 
and the law of the multiplication of the problem of 
minorities, due to the multiplication of national states, only to 
be ia the end by deportation, which did not first 
in European history at the end of the second World 
War, but after the dissolution of the Turkish Empire, A dozen 
nationalist movements arose against Austria -Hungary, as many 
against Turkey, as many against the Russian state ; then, follow- 
ing victory or coUapse, Croat nationalism against the new 
Great Serbia, Slovak against Czechoslovakia, Ukrainian against 
Poland, Transylvanian and Bessarabian against greater Ron- 
mania, Macedonian against all the established national states of 
the Balkans^ always with the constant backing of those Great 
Powers interested in the mobilization of a fifth column; the 
naive or cynical zeal with which aU the warring powers in the 
First World War supported every nationalistic or irredentist 
movement in the enemy's camp was the prelude to the catas- 
trophes that occurred between the two wars. 

In one and the same comer of the world today the various 
nationalist movements sprawl over and through one another 
and demand, as an expression of their rival claims to power and 
leadership, the loyalty and enthusiasm of the same populations. 
We have long been familiar with Arab nationalism, but also 
with the Egyptian, Iraqi, Druse and Kurd varieties. African 
nationalism is an undeniable fact, but so also are the Cameroon 
and the Bamileke, the Ghanaian and the Ashanti, the Congolese 

88 



A Rehabilitation of Nationalism? 

and the Lumumba, each of which also bears within itself both, 
the possibility of inner fragmentation and of great-power imper- 
ialism. Indian nationalism is established but has to assert itself 
over two hundred potential nationalisms ; the Pakistani has to 
make itself independent in the face of the Indian, but the 
Bengalis are still uncertain whether their nationalism is Pakistan 
or Bengali, and in North Baluchistan Pushtu nationalism is 
demanding its own Pushtunistan, This list could easily be 
lengthened ; there is no criterion of international law or political 
philosophy which can prevent any piece of the human mosaic, 
any sheikhdom on the pirate coasts, any African tribe or clan, 
any administrative district, once artificially cut from the map 
by a colonial power, from declaring itself a nation when circum- 
stances and the external balance of power are favourable. 

This is no cheap satire on the condition of peoples who, as the 
result of the decline of empires or the instability of artificially 
created states, were left without genuine moral or political 
affiliations. But it is sufficient reason at last to strip the process 
of nationalization of all romance and mysticism, and to investi- 
gate its real functions. A nation does not arise from the instinc- 
tive action of a native soul, nor through the free decision of the 
collective will. We know today that nationalism, i.e. the found- 
ing of a nation, postulates nothing else but the existence of a 
group that can in some way be enclosed within definite frontiers, 
in whose name a leadership magnates, knezes, chiefs, priests, 
teachers, propagandists, cheer-leaders, a native intelligentsia, 
or a local dynasty can claim the right of self-determination, 
i.e. the right to rule over it themselves. Frontiers in this sense 
may be organizational, administrative, or even merely propa- 
gandist ; the common link a family or tribal basis, or else a com- 
munity united by religion, language, or no more than tradition, 
a Mafia, or, simply, as in the new African states, an artificial 
administrative unit imposed by foreign rule a few decades 
earlier. Where such structural elements exist, there also exists a 
corresponding local leadership, based either on a feudal or 
religious ruling caste or a native intelligentsia. We tend today 
to assume that in the development of national revolutionary 
movements the chief role is assignable to the intelligentsia or 
semi-intelligentsia, which always and everywhere claims the 
natural right to governmental and administrative posts, and sees 
in every aspect of 'non-national* administration both material 

89 



Herbert Luthy 

disadvantages and a personal offence to its racial consciousness. 
But in Africa today 5 as in Eastern Europe yesterday, older tradi- 
tions and also dynastic claims are involved; Sekou Toure, 
descendant of a race of Sudanese conquerors, and Modibo 
Keita, heir to the medieval Mali dynasty, have returned, via 
the Quartier Latin, to claim their ancient rights. No section of 
humanity is without traditions and historically founded claims 
on which some form of nationalism can be erected ; the unfor- 
tunate fact is, rather, that the soil of every continent is soaked 
in historically based titles and claims. Nothing is more ridic- 
ulous than to challenge the historical validity of a nationalist 
movement that has begun to develop, as, for instance, the 
French have done over Algeria; nationalism, like physical 
movement, proves its reality by marching on, and even when 
there had previously been nothing in existence resembling a 
national consciousness, agitation and struggle can in no time 
create a tradition and a consciousness and a legitimate claim 
based on them for there is no other criterion. 

So long as history has existed this process has repeated itself 
again and again ; it is one half of the history of states, of which 
the other half is the formation of empires. All that is new is the 
name we have ascribed to it and the ideology that we have attri- 
buted to it, namely, "Nationalism 5 . When, at the end of the 
thirteenth century, the members of the lesser nobility and the 
ringleaders of some Swiss Alpine valleys banded themselves 
together against Habsburg domination, the sole political claim 
they laid down in their charter was 'We do not want any foreign 
judges'. This meant that they desired themselves to exercise the 
basic function of rulership, the administration of the law, and 
this claim had the backing of the mountain peasants. It was not 
a matter of demanding a superior or a better jurisdiction, but 
their own; not for an improved administration but for self- 
administration. They preferred even unjust but native judges, 
acting in conformity with their ancient customs and delivered in 
the local dialect, to the learned judgements of the Roman law 
schools delivered by foreign prefects. The basic claim of national- 
ism is nothing but the basic claim of medieval particularism. 
When today we refer to the nationalism of the Cameroons 
or Togoland, we could just as well re-write the history books 
and be referring to Waldstattian, Appenzellian, Waldausian, 
Friesian, Albigensian or Novgorodian nationalism. The desire 

90 



A of Nalionalfsm? 

to live according to one's own and customs to 

be ruled by one's fellow-countrymen is the natural desire 
of every population group that has developed its own customs 
and standards of behaviour; the rest is a matter of circum- 
stances, of historical luck, of greater or lesser originality 
and stubbornness. In the stronghold of the Swiss Alps and 
Lower Alps, in a comer of Europe where the power politics of 
the great states were in balance, the medieval particularism to 
which the concept and ideology of the nation were alien, was 
able to maintain itself down to modern times ; in the greater part 
of the rest of Europe it was stamped out by the development of 
absolutist territorial states. It was precisely the chief historical 
feature of the great nations of Western Europe that as they 
passed through the melting-pot of absolutism, i.e. the centrally 
administered state, they were welded out of dozens of particular 
groups into uniform masses of subjects and these, during the 
social and political revolutions at the turn of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, became nations in the modem sense of 
the term. For the very reason that they had not developed spon- 
taneously, but were synthetic creations, they needed or rather, 
the new leadership that had taken over the dynastic apparatus 
of government needed a nationalist ideology to support them. 

The concept of the nation, which was equally unnecessary to 
medieval communal autonomism and to medieval overlord- 
ship, belongs historically to the period of transformation at the 
beginning of the ii .ustrial age ; it was born simultaneously with 
the twin concept of democracy. The decisive moment occurred 
with the changeover of the principle of legitimization ; when 
government was no longer carried on in the name of a legitimate 
rulership but in the name of the people (be it the entire popula- 
tion of the state or its politically active representatives) the 
population had to be conceived as a political unity. Nationalism 
was the ideological integrator of the democratic state. An indi- 
vidualistic democracy, such as was dreamed of by the rationalist 
political philosophers of the eighteenth century, cannot provide 
a practical form of government, but merely that anarchistic form 
of Utopia which heads the beginning of every revolutionary 
movement. (The formula 'Government of the people, for the 
people, and by the people' postulates the identity of people and 
state, i.e. the abolition of the state as a separate institution, in 
the same way as does Marxist theory.) Rousseau, although very 

G 91 



Herbert Luthy 

much against his wish, knew this to be the case, because he 
knew the endless civic strifes of the citizens of his native 
Geneva. Rousseau's entire works are a protest of Genevese- 
Calvinist reaction against the corrupting penetration of 
'frivolous French civilization' a corrupt local oligarchy sup- 
ported by France, the introduction of French theatrical com- 
panies enforced on Geneva by diplomatic and military coercion 
and his reaction was so strong precisely because he himself 
was a strayed sheep who never found his way back to the fold. 
A community of subjects requires no national loyalties and an 
army no patriotic enthusiasm, but a democracy needs a 
nationalistic ideology for the integration of its citizens and its 
citizen armies ; the French Revolution became nationalistic at 
the moment when it became terroristic. The nationalism of the 
nineteenth century was no longer instinctively inborn, but a 
deliberately fostered ideology of unity. Since the French Revolu- 
tion all democratic constitutions elaborated a mass of rites and 
institutions for the training of national feelings presentation of 
colours, civic oaths, national holidays, re-writing of history, 
folklore, the entire apparatus of education and cultural adminis- 
tration was drawn into the service of national consciousness. 
Nationalism is basically a terroristic ideology that imposes, 
conformity of thought and behaviour on the members of those 
population groups it has either seized or claimed. Enmity, sus- 
picion, or prejudice towards other national groups or unassi- 
milated minorities are front-line weapons in the service of 
nationalist integration. Helvetius said that in a nation of hunch- 
backs it is a citizen's duty to wear the national hump, i.e. to 
think, feel and react in conformity to the national basis ; nothing 
is more typical of this kind of ideology than expressions such as 
'un-German', 'un-American', etc., which brand the failure to 
wear the national hump as monstrous or even delinquent be- 
haviour. Autonomism, individualism, or cosmopolitanism, any 
form of non-nationalistic, pre-nationalistic or super-national- 
istic loyalties is regarded in the last resort as criminal. For over a 
century the cherishing of the nationalist hump and the attempt 
to condition in the Pavlov manner nationalistic behaviour 
patterns was the supreme educational aim of school-teaching 
and the re-writing of history from the patriotic point of view, 
and with enormous success. Wherever nationalistic ideologies 
hold power, witch-hunting can at any moment break out; in 

92 



A Rehabilitation of Nationalism? 

times of crisis or war every form of nonconformity becomes 
high treason, and in this century the citizens of aH European 
nations have experienced how effectively this mental terrorism 
can exclude or defame any form of rational thought, 

As nationalism is, according to definition, a national attitude, 
it is difficult to agree on how it should be defined, and this might 
lead to a misunderstanding in our discussion owing to the differ- 
ent shades of linguistic meaning between the Continental and 
the English uses of the term. I fear that I may here be speaking 
of an entirely different concept from Professor Polanyi's, The 
advantages of that political good sense he attributes to the 
English nation, in my opinion, include the fact that they do not 
know what 'nationalism* ('Nationalisms') is. As far as I am 
aware, the term 'nationalism' is generally used in English as a 
synonym for patriotism or love of one's own homeland, and 
everything that is a matter of public property or public concern 
is called ' national'; the mystical terminology of nationalism 
(' Nationalisms ') is foreign to a language which refers to 'this 
country 9 or 'Her Majesty's Government' whilst elsewhere oaths 
of allegiance are taken to the fatherland or the nation. The gulli- 
bility with regard to such phenomena as national socialism or 
Arab nationalism which for a long time prevailed in England 
was largely due to this ignorance of pathological nationalism. 
I would like to ascribe this very sympathetic but sometimes 
dangerous unawareness of certain diseases, as is the case with so 
many other English advantages, to English insularity. I know 
how silly such distinctions of 'national minds' generally are ; but 
this is a question of language and the meaning of political lang- 
uage in every country is the outcome of that country's particular 
historical experience and tradition, which makes it more difficult 
to translate and more subject to becoming absurd in literal 
translation, than any other. The English were favoured insofar 
as they were able to become a nation (or to achieve nationhood) 
without too ardent struggles towards that end, and without hav- 
ing become a problem to themselves in the process of defining 
'uniqueness'. Since 1066 the unity of the English kingdom has 
never been challenged from within or without; there were epic 
struggles for succession rights and forms of government but not 
over the unity of succession and government. No Armada since 
1066 ever reached the English coast; and even the unification of 
the British Isles was eventually accomplished as an 'internal 

93 



Herbert Luthy 

affair 9 , without more effective foreign intervention than some 
Important French intrigues in Scotland and Ireland. If the 
French Revolution had taken place in as similarly privileged 
circumstances as the English civil war of the seventeenth century 
and the long subsequent dynastic troubles, and if It had been 
allowed to develop equally undisturbed by exterior Influences,, it 
too might have been spared the transformation Into a form of 
terroristic nationalism. The English citizen, Insofar as he did not 
belong to the aristocracy, was sufficiently protected against 
foreign influence by the mere insularity of Ms country, without 
the necessity for an Ideology of nationalistic Integration. Until 
recent times Britain could feel herself sufficiently protected by 
her fleet to dispense with conscription and any form of militarism 
along Continental lines, this most compulsory form of "Integra- 
tion of the souls' ; the English are the only people in the world 
who even today still proudly refer to themselves as subjects, for 
to be a British subject meant always the contrary of being tied to 
the soil an unparalleled liberty of movement over seas and 
continents and was a greater privilege than to be a state 
citizen of any republic. 

To be sure, England has developed aspects of nationalism and 
Imperialism just as repulsive as those revealed by any Continen- 
tal nation, but without posing similar problems ; her nationalism 
remained a form of arrogant insularity and her imperialism 
was a struggle of a nation of traders and seafarers for the free- 
dom of the seas their freedom to trade, sail and settle every- 
where not for frontier provinces and frontier populations. 
During centuries England strove to solve her own nationality 
problem, the Irish, by every means of suppression, even to 
genocide, by methods comparable to the very worst Continental 
examples, but even this remained an internal affair. The history 
of Ireland is as tragic as that of Poland, but in contrast to Poland 
Ireland had no other neighbour but England, which lay like a 
mighty barrier between that small island and Europe ; no other 
Power was able to employ this potential fifth column, no 'world 
conscience' built up a literature of accusation against the 
'enslavers of Eire*, no European Lord Byron sang of the sor- 
rows of Ireland; England did not solve her Irish problem any 
more successfully than France her Algerian, but Ireland never 
succeeded in becoming a painful spot in world politics. It is not a 
denigration of these English virtues of 'suspended logic 9 if I 

94 



A of Nationalism? 

believe they rest to a great degree on an of 

hopelessly entangled problems and an equally enviable good 
conscience. 

That is probably the reason why the English example, "often 
imitated but never attained 9 , has remained so sterile, in spite of 
ail the willingness to learn from it on the part of Continental 
Europeans ; the English constitution is as inimitable as English 
history itself. Nowhere outside England was 'national unity 5 a 
natural condition, to be regarded as a matter of course ; every- 
where else the ideology of nationalistic integration was indis- 
pensable to the foundation of the nation. Some loose form of 
conditional loyalty is insufficient to hold together a political 
community that is not merely a collection of subjects; this 
requires a certain degree of automatic, unconditional loyalty, 
and where this cannot be postulated in advance, it must be 
drilled in. When the New England colonies seceded from Eng- 
land their leaders did not concern themselves with the question 
as to whether their claim to independence was legitimized by 
their being a nation of their own; their practical, technical 
motives for rebellion against the legislation of a distant Parlia- 
ment, that regarded their particular needs and aspirations as of 
secondary importance, seemed to them amply sufficient for the 
purpose. 

The term 'nationalism 3 is as inadequate to describe the 
revolt of the thirteen colonies as it is to describe the revolt of the 
free Swiss valleys or that of the Mau Man, American national- 
ism was subsequently developed, in part very deliberately, as an 
ideology of integration, as a negation of all those nationalities 
that went into the 'melting-pot 5 . But similarly to its English 
counterpart, free of external problems, this political and rational 
form of nationalism the absorption, individually, of displaced 
persons into a new community, replacing all the national back- 
grounds from which they originated is inimitable and untrans- 
mittable ; the same process has never been repeated elsewhere. 
The assumption that nationalism and democracy are insepar- 
ableand even practically identical became a basic tenet of 
American political thought (e.g. Professor W. MacDougalFs 
The American Nation). With Wilson this tenet became a matter 
of world history, and the least one can say is that it has not 
helped to make the world safe for democracy. Anglo-Saxon 
theorists never seemed to grasp the fact that in the old world 

95 



Herbert Luthy 

nationalism was the extreme example of the destructive effect of 
* secularized religiosity' and of 'powerful moral passion 5 that 
had been led astray, or, if they did so, regarded this merely as the 
result of occasional and therefore abnormal excesses. 

Above all the most deeprooted characteristic of nationalism 
in settled populations living side by side or sometimes even inter- 
mingled with one another, which caused not only Marxists but 
also liberals of the classical school invariably to repudiate 
nationalism as a reactionary ideology, remained completely 
alien to both English and American experience; this charac- 
teristic was the mobilization of the atavistic instincts of an autar- 
kical agrarian society against the 'uprooting 5 and 'social disin- 
tegration' inseparable from modern industrial society. To the 
same degree as industrialization and world economics dissolved 
the former links with clan and soil, ancestry, totem animals, the 
native ground, 'blood and soil', ancestor worship, xenophobia 
and endogamy became the ideological postulates of nationalism, 
taught with religious zeal. And in fact nationalism did often 
serve as an ideological bulwark against revolutionary tendencies, 
against those of a democratic character in the nineteenth 
century and against Communistic advances in the twenti- 
eth (the nationality principle against world revolution, Ver- 
sailles against Bolshevism, Wilson against Lenin). This bulwark 
was illusory, and the Bolshevik politicians soon discovered 
that in almost every part of the world nationalism could in fact 
be utilized far more effectively as dynamite than as cement: 
nationalism as an atavistic defence mechanism against the 
social transformations of modern times which basically 
are a defeudalization of humanity turns for that reason first 
against the industrial powers of the West, because it was they 
who had entrapped all other countries into the net of world 
economy, and because, in the name of free enterprise, they 
neglected for too long the social consequences of this process 
(in their own countries as well as in the rest of the world), whilst 
Communism offered a universal recipe for social reintegration. 
The attempt of the Western world, made for the first time in 
Eastern Europe and other border countries of Russia after 1918, 
to whip up their nationalist ideologies against the revolution, 
was an admission that they possessed no organizational prin- 
ciples appropriate to the industrial age, and that they were 
attempting to exorcize the problems of the present by means of 

96 



A Rehabilitation of Nationalism? 

the fetishes of the past ; this, in spite of occasional tactical suc- 
cesses was a rearguard battle lost in advance. Today the 
Western world is beginning slowly and unwillingly to feel its 
way towards both pluralistic and supra-national forms of 
organization. There is as yet no indication of a definite success in 
this direction, yet it is my firm conviction that no other method 
has any future, and that retreat would be catastrophic. 

In recent years Titoism, the East German rising of 1953, the 
Hungarian and Polish revolutions of 1956, the Tibetan rising 
and similar events have led to a kind of rehabilitation of 
nationalism in Western thought. This is in the first instance 
merely an expression of relief at the fact that the Soviet system 
is also having trouble with nationalistic reactions, and of the 
understandable sympathy with every form of resistance to an 
equally brutal and deceitful despotism. Yet I nevertheless con- 
sider it important that we should not develop a double-minded- 
ness with regard to a pathological phenomenon which, when it 
appears in the West, we regard as a plague, but of which, when 
it breaks out in the Communist Empire, we approve simply 
because it causes disquiet to the Communist rulers behind the 
Iron Curtain. If we were technicians and tacticians of the Cold 
War, for whom on the model of Machiavellism in any given 
period everything that is damaging to one's opponents is justi- 
fiable, we might also include nationalistic ideology among our 
intellectual weapons, but in that case we would do well to do so 
with the same degree of cold cynicism with which Communistic 
propaganda includes nationalism in its own strategy ; regarding 
it as a factor in collective psychology which one must take into 
account and which can be used as a destructive force against the 
enemy, but which must be rejected as a means of any construc- 
tive policy. 

It is indisputable and basically inevitable that the disturbances 
in the satellite states included a strong nationalistic element. 
No collective resistance to a strongly grounded overlordship 
could dispense with an organizational basis, a frame and a 
symbol of unity. In the Asian, African (and one hundred 
and fifty years ago, American) colonial territories, the struggle 
for independence was at first inevitably organized within this 
colonial framework, even when the latter was a completely arti- 
ficial and arbitrary creation (and it is clear that in Africa, at least, 
this is merely a preliminary phase, which must be followed by 

97 



regional federations or territorial re-organizations of the 
Continent if Africa is not to become 'balkanized* in its turn). 
In the same way the resistance against the centralized rule in the 
Soviet Empire finds its natural support in the formerly inde- 
pendent states, which continue to exist as political, administra- 
tive and even economic units and which, in their national 
sections of the ruling party, even possess a certain degree of 
formal autonomy. Beyond all nationalistic mythology there are 
purely practical and mechanical reasons why tendencies towards 
the loosening and differentiation of the Communist bloc must 
ran along such lines, and it is equally obvious that in these cases 
many historical memories and symbols of earlier struggles for 
independence should be re-awakened. But these former symbols 
and memories are also present in our own minds, and we have 
fallen into the fatal habit of classing every struggle for self- 
government and autonomy as a nationalist movement, without 
troubling to investigate its basic motives and claims. 

I do not in the least dispute the strength or justification of 
specifically national effects, or of those rooted in national tradi- 
tions (the fact, for example, that Poland and Hungary are the 
two Catholic provinces of Eastern Europe, whose religious 
tradition for nearly a thousand years was almost Identical with 
their national one, which, among other reasons, caused them to 
remain immune to the Influences of Great Russian, Pan-Slavic 
and Greek Orthodox propaganda, although it is debatable 
whether 'national 9 is an adequate description of such com- 
plex historical facts). But the demand for autonomy by cultural, 
religious, or even simply regional communities, for Individual 
freedom of thought and behaviour permitting Individuals as well 
as historical and social groups to breathe and develop freely, 
is not in essence nationalistic. The demand of Hungarian work- 
ers to have the right to form free trade unions or the struggle of 
Hungarian peasants against collectivization, do not seem to me 
to require any additional legitimlzation on the grounds of nat- 
ional traditions going back to the Hungarian feudal state 
which knew neither trade unions nor free peasants; and the 
demand of Hungarian writers for the right to 'write the truth' 
would only diminish if it were made in the name of a speci- 
fically Hungarian truth or national * otherness'. The demand for 
human rights and human dignity which also includes the right 
to individualism and autonomy of the social groups which make 

98 



A Rehabilitation of Nationalism? 

up the human mosaic Is not a national right and needs BO 
nationalistic justification. No doubt we have to reckon with 
present day linguistics, which define any autonomist movement 
as nationalism, but in that case we must also draw the conse- 
quences of such a misuse of the term. 'Nationalism for every- 
one' cannot be regarded as synonymous with the traditional 
conception of the nation as the highest form of human integra- 
tion, of s national sovereignty' as the highest organizational 
form of human relationships, nor with an international order 
which would be exclusively a system of relationships between 
sovereign national states, for in this case 'nationalism for every- 
one' would mean the return of humanity to tribalism and the 
prehistoric horde. Europe not only provided the world with the 
concept of the nation, but also with the concept of balkaniza- 
tion. The path to progress beyond the universal totalitarian 
state and beyond nihilism cannot be sought in a return to 
balkanization. 



99 



Revolutionary Nationalism 
ALBERT HOURANI 



IF most communities in the modern world have followed the 
path of the French Revolution rather than English reform, 
that is not because they preferred the doctrines of Rousseau 
to those of Locke on Intellectual or aesthetic grounds, but 
because the experience of France has been more relevant to their 
problems than that of England ; and it was the gravity of these 
problems, rather than the influence of Dostoievsky, which 
pushed some of them to the logical extreme of nihilism, while 
others managed to achieve the 6 suspended logic' of England and 
America. Faced with certain problems, all traditional institu- 
tions and all habits of compromise, however deeply rooted, 
break down. In what follows I shall try to describe some of the 
factors which pushed the peoples of the world along the path of 
revolutionary secular nationalism ; my examples will be drawn 
from one group of peoples, those which formerly belonged to 
the Ottoman Empire, but what I say may be, in some measure, 
relevant to others as well. 

That they belonged to the Ottoman Empire is indeed the first 
thing which should seize our attention. When the modern civili- 
zation of Europe first presented itself to the peoples of the 
world, it found most of them in the throes of one of the great 
natural movements of history, and indeed the influence of 
Europe was first felt as something inserted into that movement 
and complicating it rather than as an independent factor. This 
movement was that of the disintegration of great empires 
Turkish and Persian, Mogul and Chinese. All these were cen- 
turies old, and were undergoing that process by which the 
effort of will which creates an Empire relaxes, and the 'charm' 
which holds it together begins to fade. The dissolution of a great, 
ancient and complex political system brings with it not adminis- 
trative and economic strain alone but moral strain also. Empires 

101 



Revolutionary Nationalism 

establish themselves in the heart ; to survive four hundred years 
they cannot rest on force alone but must win themselves a gen- 
eral acquiescence and some active loyalty. So it was with the 
Ottoman Empire. It was not in its great days simply an auto- 
cracy holding down unwilling peoples. That is what it became 
at the very end, but its becoming so was itself a sign of its decline 
and imminent collapse. In its great days Ottoman rule had been 
deeply rooted in its subjects* minds. For the Moslem element 
(whether Turk or not) the Sultan was the greatest ruler of Sunni 
Islam, the defender of the frontier against Christian Europe and 
Shi'i Persia and guardian of the holy cities ; between Mm and 
them ran the link of the Law, recognized by both as sovereign 
in the Empire and standing above the ruler's will. The non- 
Moslem subjects did not look at the Sultan's rule In this way, 
but they too acquiesced because of economic interest, because 
of their recognized status as separate communities managing 
their own affairs under their own lords, or because of that 
' charm* which power exercises as long as it is not challenged and 
while it has not lost its nerve. 

When Empires disintegrate they do so in two ways : first geo- 
graphically, by the escape of regions and peoples from central 
control into autonomy and independence ; secondly, by way of 
moral dissolution, the relaxation of the bond of trust between 
government and ruled. The Ottoman Government failed to give 
its subjects just and efficient rule springing from some principle 
they could accept, and they in their turn one section after 
another ceased to give it the active loyalty and participation 
which governments require, in the modern age more than 
before. This moral collapse was one of which the Ottomans 
themselves were aware, and even in the great sixteenth century, 
Turkish writers were analysing the Empire's decay and asserting 
that there was no remedy except a revival of the public virtues 
among rulers and ruled. In the nineteenth century the Ottoman 
Government made a deliberate attempt to bring about such a 
revival, by creating a new political system which could once 
more be the focus of loyalty and the ground of virtue. But it 
failed in the end to create a morally unified 'Ottoman 5 nation, 
and there were many reasons for the failure the chain-reaction 
set up by the first successful revolt, that of the Greeks ; the factor 
of religious difference, the desire for religious autonomy taking 
the secularized form of the demand for communal indepen- 

102 



Albert Hourani 

dence ; above all, the fact that political systems do not disinte- 
grate easily, and the Empire was forced, In its last dreadful 
phase, to turn its back on its own Ideal of egalitarian patriotism, 
and become an autocracy simply to survive. Finally, the ruling 
element Itself, the Turks, turned against the Empire as having 
been more trouble than it was worth, and, in a last scene not 
without Its pathos, declared that the Ottoman Sultanate had 
'passed for ever Into history'. 

With the weakening of the Sultan's power, and still more 
when he disappeared, a new problem presented itself to all his 
subjects, but particularly to those who, by education and In 
other ways, had become conscious of a world beyond their tribe 
or village. It was not simply the problem of making other 
arrangements for their administration, for that, over a large 
part of the Empire, was taken over by Britain and France. It 
was something more fundamental: a problem of Identity. 
'Who am I* is the first of all questions ; posed in political terms. 
It could be easily answered during the great Ottoman days. *F 
was a member of a religious community and a subject of the 
Sultan. But now that the religious community was being sec- 
ularized and the Sultan's grip had relaxed, it became a real ques- 
tion. It was an urgent one, because a man's self-identification Is 
the basis of his rights and duties, and the moral ground of the com- 
munity ; and It was a complex one, because it was not clear and 
obvious how men should think of themselves. Brought up In an 
Empire where races, languages and religions had mixed together, 
open to doctrines from Europe as well as their own cultures, 
enclosed in a hierarchy of communities stretching outwards 
from the family, through tribe, village and district, trade-guild, 
town-quarter and city to the universal religious community, 
they could identify themselves in more than one way; and 
it was only gradually, and not without pain, that the 'nation', 
defined in terms of an equivocal blend of religion and language, 
emerged as the basis of political morality and organization. 

The new dynamic nationalism, therefore, meant for the 
peoples of the Near East and mutatis mutandis for other peoples 
an attempt to rediscover themselves, to identify themselves 
and so re-create their political life. It was dynamic and revolu- 
tionary, because before life could be re-created it was or at 
least it seemed necessary to shake oneself free from the dying 
body of the Empire, and also for another reason as well. The 

103 



Revolutionary Nationalism 

vast expansion of Western Europe, and above all of Britain 
and France an expansion of goods, of armies, of ideas and 
political systems was the greatest event of the nineteenth 
century^ and not only in economic and political history but in 
that of the human imagination. This inexorable advance, which 
seemed likely to leave no corner of the world untouched, re- 
vealed the existence of a strength as yet undreamed of; and it 
was clear that the advance could not be resisted, nor European 
control once imposed thrown off, unless a similar strength 
could be generated. Thus there began that typical movement of 
the period, the search for the ' secret ' of European strength ; and 
it is characteristic of the difference between that age and this that 
we, if we posed the question, would think first of all of heavy 
industry and technology, and the scientific attitude which makes 
them possible, while our fathers would have tended to ignore or 
minimize the difference of material strength and lay all their 
emphasis on the superior political institutions and morality of 
Europe: on national unity and self-sacrifice, on the active 
co-operation of go vernments and people, on representative institu- 
tions as a means to both these, and behind all this on the inces- 
sant energy moral, intellectual and practical alike of the 
Western peoples. Thus the desire to emulate the strength of 
Europe seemed to confirm the lesson of Ottoman decline : what 
was needed was a revival of communal strength and virtue, 
focused on the idea of the nation, and aiming in the first instance 
at the overthrow of European control, by violent means if 
necessary, and then at the re-creation of real political life. 

The need for an identity and a community, for public virtue 
and national strength, the idea of the national as the focus of 
virtue and Parliamentary government as its school : these are the 
forces which have led, in the last hundred years, to the partition 
of the great Empires into several dozen sovereign states. But has 
humanity in the end obtained what it sought? It is difficult to 
draw up a judgment on a whole period of history, although 
equally difficult, and in the end more dangerous, to refuse to 
judge and believe that history transcends our judgment and is 
indeed the norm of our morality. But if we had to draw up a 
balance-sheet for the period of national struggle and independ- 
ence, it might read somewhat as follows. First of all, the effort 
to become independent has in fact generated a dynamic energy, 
a sense of unity and a corporate self-confidence which to some 

104 



Albert Hourani 

extent have formed the ground of political virtue : nationalism 
has created a sense of active responsibility, if only for a limited 
society, and that 'mutual affection of fellow-citizens' of which 
Polanyi speaks. The care of a national government for its own 
people, when it exists, is something different from the care of a 
benevolent foreign government; and the spirit in which men 
accept injustice from those they regard as belonging to them- 
selves is quite different from that in which they acquiesce in the 
injustice of a conqueror. But on the other hand, often the moral 
unity does not go very deep. Much depends on how inde- 
pendence is achieved : if too easily, the process does not produce 
a real and lasting national cohesion, and if too difficult the 
cohesion may be created and then broken in pieces. Much 
depends too on when independence is achieved : it can come too 
early or too late. Again, the State when created may not be co- 
terminous with the 'nation' as nationalism defines it, and 
neither may correspond to the natural community created by 
geography and history. For all three to have the same extension, 
there must be a combination of factors such as rarely occurs : 
clear natural frontiers, one religion, one language and culture, a 
historical tradition of unity. When this combination is lacking, 
there is something artificial or abstract about the idea of the 
'nation'. Men are defined in terms of less than their whole 
selves, and the result is a lack of depth and reality in the sense of 
solidarity, the break-up of historical communities, self-division, 
and conflicting claims to land or to men's allegiance. 

What may be more dangerous still, the struggle for inde- 
pendence has often led to the exaltation of one set of virtues at 
the expense of others : of those which are necessary for the 
struggle unity, loyalty, self-sacrifice rather than those of the 
solitary seeker after the truth, or of the kind of citizen or leader 
who is more concerned to defend the individual against society 
than to defend his society against another. The national ideal, as 
moulded by the heroic struggle for freedom, does not always 
serve as the ground of the moral qualities which are necessary 
to run a democratic system in an independent State. Once inde- 
pendence has been achieved, Parliamentary government may 
mean a weak executive and national division ; so it is condemned 
in the name of the national ideal, the complex of ideas built 
around the concept of the nation tends to dissolve, and the 
dynamism it has generated finds no channel through which to 

105 



Revolutionary Nationalism 

express itself. In some countries, the resulting frustration may 
express itself in the attempt to expand ; but on the other hand 
prudence, the euphoria of Independence, the consciousness of 
military weakness, the existence of the United Nations, the 
influence of the universal principles in the name of which 
Independence has been won all these may work in the opposite 
direction. States, being Independent centres of decision, must 
always find it difficult to live side by side, and there can never 
be a complete harmony of interest between them. The process of 
dividing the world into sovereign States could not have taken 
place without friction, and has left behind It, now that it is 
nearing completion, several million refugees; but it has left 
behind it surprisingly few territorial disputes. There are only 
one or two soch disputes so bitter that they may lead to a major 
war ; the most dangerous of course is the dispute over Palestine. 
On the whole, the frustration which comes so easily after inde- 
pendence tends to show itself in moral disintegration : this 
expresses itself in civil strife or in a civic Indifference which leads 
in its turn to despotism. 

The classical nationalism does not always therefore create a 
lasting strength ; but strength albeit of a rather different sort 
is even more necessary after independence than before. The new 
States find themselves faced with the interests and pressure of 
the Great Powers, and also with neighbours who, although no 
Great Powers In the strict sense, may still be great in proportion 
to them. What is more important, they are touched by new ideas 
by that new ideology of economic and social development 
which is taking the place of the ideology of nationalism, or else 
giving it a new content. It is only through economic develop- 
ment, the modern world believes, that nations can be strong and 
morally united ; only a developing State can be morally heal thy and 
united. So the problem is still that of strength, and of the social 
and poll ticalvirtueswhichareinseparablyconnectedwithstrength. 
But the type of strength which is needed, and the type of virtue 
exalted, have changed in the process. If one asks what is needed 
by a developing society, the answer must be complex : technical 
accomplishment and the intellectual habits underlyingit ; political 
consciousness, the awareness of what is being aimed at ; a special 
kind of social discipline, that of the intelligent individual, con- 
scious of Ms own interests but willing to accept subordination 
of Ms good to that of others, and of present to future goods ; 

106 



Albert Hourani 

flexible institutions, free from the chains of custom ; a strong 
executive, able to plan, to impose its conception of change, to 
intervene actively in the economic process, and to bring about 
rapidly changes which otherwise might take several generations. 

There are some countries, like India and Tunisia, where the 
ideas of development and reform were implicit in the idea of 
nationalism even before independence came, and where the 
social and moral preparation for development therefore took 
place at the same time as the struggle for independence. In these 
fortunate countries, It may be that development will come 
about and the new type of strength be generated within a Parlia- 
mentary system, and it is possible to hope for that * suspended 
logic', that acceptance of existing Institutions, which Polanyi 
calls for. In other States, however, we must at least ask the 
question, whether there is not a certain contradiction between 
Polanyi's ideal State and the kind of State visited by rapid 
development. The States of Asia and Africa, faced with the need 
for rapid social and economic change, may well decide that only 
two paths lie open to them. One is that of Communism, on the 
Chinese rather than the Russian model, for the example of 
China its problems and its sudden leap forward into the age of 
industry and technology seems more relevant to Asia and 
Africa than that of Russia, a European state in a different phase 
of change. The other is that of 4 popular nationalism', with 
Egypt as the most obvious example: a nationalism which 
emphasizes the future rather than the past, the heroic individual 
remaking the social world, the popular will embodied in a pop- 
ular leader, and a territorial patriotism with the great dams and 
steelworks as its totems. The dangers of this are obvious. Once 
more, the dynamism generated by internal construction and 
hope of better things may be diverted outwards ; and the claim 
for a viable unit of development, for water, minerals or oil- 
royalties, can give rise to conflicts no less than the claim for 
'natural frontiers* or the incorporation of one nation in one 
State. Once more, the emphasis on the future good of all may 
lead to neglect of the present rights of the individual But it 
seems more likely than not that, except in a few favoured coun- 
tries, men will be willing to incur these dangers, and for the sake 
of a real or imagined social well-being, will continue to accept 
'the rationalist ideal of a secular society *, and to pour into it all 
the fervour of a religion restated in secular terms. 

H 107 



Criticism and Discussion 



HERBERT LUTHY: . . . these States have become too small . . . 

I shall deal with only one aspect of the problem that Is, with 
the question of whether the reawakening of national conscious- 
ness in Europe is to be reckoned as one of the phenomena of 
revisionism that might lead us back, beyond ideological relig- 
ions, to a peaceful, tolerant and well-balanced society. There are 
two sets of events that might lead us to conclude that this is so. 
One of them is our unequivocal approval of the efforts made by 
the former colonial peoples to achieve independence. This 
involves the very difficult question of whether that movement 
should be regarded as nationalistic : in point of fact we are no 
longer clear as to what really constitutes nationalism, once we 
get outside Europe. 

In my opinion it is completely arbitrary to apply the words 
4 nationalism* to every movement towards independence by a 
colonial population, when we cannot even say definitely to what 
extent it is related to a specific nation. There is no rule of inter- 
national law, or even of political philosophy, which would 
justify opposition to the efforts of the Luluas or the Balubas to 
achieve their independence, or deny them the right to represent 
themselves as a nation. Neither is there any rule of international 
law or political philosophy under which we could dispute the 
right of the Bakongo to pursue the reunification of the sections 
of their people which have been divided up between the former 
French Equatorial Africa, the former Belgian Congo, and Por- 
tuguese Angola, in the same way that Germany aspires towards 
reunification. I think it would lead us into great complications if 
we were to raise the question of the definition of a nation here ; 
and broadly speaking, the international vocabulary has univer- 
sally adopted the custom of applying the word 'nation' to any 
community that constitutes a State or wishes to constitute one 
and, on the strength of that fact, applies for representation in the 

109 



Criticism and Discussion 

United Nations. It is almost inevitable for us here in Europe to 
approach a discussion of nationalism predominantly in relation 
to ourselves and our own experience, for we are really the only 
people who have any idea of what the term originally signified. 

But to come back to the one point with which I have to deal 
does the reawakening of nationalism in the Communist sphere 
of influence represent a movement towards freedom, one which 
has important implications for the future? We must of course 
begin by dismissing the suggestion that all the totalitarian ideol- 
ogies might justifiably be regarded as equal. For the notion that 
nationalism, the reawakening of nationalist movements, could 
ever have helped to overthrow a Fascist or Nazi form of 
totalitarianism must, of course, be dismissed as absurd. Nat- 
ional Socialism, Fascism, the Iron Guard were themselves 
nationalist movements, out to overcome the Communist 
danger : we have had that already, and had its results too. 

It is a different matter, of course, in the Communist sphere of 
influence, and we can all make the comparison between the 
Polish and Hungarian independence movements and those of 
the colonial peoples. Yesterday we listened to a number of 
representatives of Hungary and Poland ; and it struck me right 
away as curious that not one of them stressed, or even men- 
tioned, the national aspect of their respective revolutions. The 
spiritual leaders of those uprisings were concerned, not with a 
specifically Hungarian or Polish social order, but with a proper 
form of society. It goes without saying that the struggle had a 
national flavour about it, because no actual historical struggle 
can take place in a no-man's-land of abstract humanity ; it must 
be carried on in the actual existing framework of State institu- 
tions, with the possibilities they offer for seizing power and 
fighting political battles. The question is, whether the nation- 
alistic flavour of the battle is its determining aspect, the one 
which will most influence the future. I have said that it is not, 
and I deliberately exaggerated the polemical aspect of my paper, 
because I think it was in the interest of the debate for me to do so. 

I would like to present the problem of nationalism as part of 
the question of a possible international order of society. It was 
repeatedly said here that the real Fall, the starting-point of the 
St. Vitus' dance of ideologies and of totalitarian movements, 
was not the logical result of a particular philosophy or set of 
deas, but the outcome of the First World War. And the First 

110 



Criticism and Discussion 

World War was not the collapse of a particular social order 
bourgeois or capitalist, democratic or totalitarian It was the 
collapse of an international order that knew of no principle of 
organization except nationalism that possessed no statesmen 
capable of thinking on an International scale. And the real 
question I want to ask In speaking of nationalism Is whether, 
even for us, nationalism Is still the only conceivable principle of 
integration. For in the course of history nationalism has served 
as the principle of Integration for the European community, 
which transcended Its small particularisms and individualist 
features and built up a sense of homogeneity. The nationalism of 
the great nationalist powers in Europe was not a spontaneous 
development among people of a national feeling that had existed 
from the first ; it was a deliberately-propagated sense of union, 
intended to promote the sense of integration, In connection 
with the transfer of the principle of legitimacy from the absolute 
ruler to the nation, which became the new principle of unity. 
By yesterday's standards, though not by those of today, those 
great powers were too large to generate a spontaneous feeling of 
unity. Their nationalism was always a form of artificial, 
synthetic, ideological cohesion, backed up by all the State 
institutions, including the schools. By today's standards, on the 
universal scale these States have become too small, and we are 
confronted by the question of whether or not we can devise a 
supranational, pluralistic, federalist principle of integration 
for a supranational order of society which will guarantee the 
right of every group not only the existing nations, but every 
group with individual characteristics to develop freely. 

ALBERT HOURANI: . . . nationalists directed towards the future 

The modern nation states are our equivalents of the warlords of 
the past. The form is different because the circumstances are 
different. You have a spread of education which makes everyone 
able and eager to help in the political process. You have the loss 
of the idea of a divine order which the successor can preserve 
and which gives him his legitimate title to succeed. You have the 
collapse of the traditional communities into which people can 
withdraw. The State and its policy matter much more to every 
Individual than they did in the past. And so this process of disin- 
tegration has become a conscious one. What was in previous 

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Criticism and Discussion 

days a struggle of armies has become a struggle of Ideas and of 
parties, a search for a valid principle of cohesion and of legiti- 
macy, a search also for a government or a ruler which embodies 
it. Now at this point, something arbitrary enters in. 

It is at this point that, searching for a principle of legitimacy, 
people in Asia and Africa took over ideas from Europe. There 
was something almost accidental about it; but one can trace the 
process. To take an example in Egyptian nationalism : It was, 
one can say, almost an accident that one of the first theorists of 
Egyptian nationalism went to Paris in the first age of European 
Egyptology. His imagination was touched by the image of 
ancient Egypt in Paris and not in Cairo. But it is not wholly 
arbitrary, for what was universal and essential was the sense of 
European strength. Europe, for Asia and Africa, was to be 
feared, but also to be admired. And there took place the clas- 
sical movement of the nineteenth and earliest twentieth cen- 
turies : the search for the secret of European strength, which was 
found in national unity and loyalty. Nationalism, to put it in 
other words, is the irrational factor, the attractive force which 
serves to bind people together into a community. Strictly it 
means nothing except to those who feel it because they are con- 
scious of being members of a community. But we are the 
prisoners of our own choice. Once adopted, the national idea 
gathers to itself other ideas, and some of these may be nihilistic 
ideas : self-worship, assertion of will, the right to expand. But to 
say this is simply to say that man is sinful, that any belief can be 
prolonged in a wrong direction: the necessary self-confidence 
of an imperial people has become the idea of racial inequality. 
Even liberalism in a nature not strong enough to bear its noble 
ideals can degenerate into a sort of moral hysteria. Whether 
nationalism takes this wrong turning depends on innumerable 
factors : on whether the idea of divine law still exists, whether the 
judiciary is free, whether the university is free, whether the 
nation at the beginning of its independent career is fortunate 
enough to find leaders who possess not only the political power 
to win independence and to organize it but a genuine moral 
sensibility, etc. 

The world is now divided into nation-states, but a new 
problem arises, for which the idea of the nation is still essential. 
The idea of social and economic development involves, as we all 
know, government intervention over the whole range of life, the 

112 



Criticism and Discussion 

active co-operation of people with government, a sense of social 
responsibility, a willingness to sacrifice present to future goods, 
and a new relationship between the independent state and the 
outside world. For all these purposes, cohesion and solidarity 
and unity are necessary. There must still be some irrational force 
of attraction which holds together the community. In the mod- 
em world, in Asia and Africa, I can see two such forces of 
attraction : there is the force of the Communist idea and there is 
the force of popular nationalism. And this popular nationalism 
is attracting to itself new ideas, any ideas which advance its 
developments. 

One could say, putting it briefly, that the past has been abol- 
ished, that the eyes of the nationalists of the present generation 
are directed not towards the real or supposed glories of the past 
but towards the future, real or imagined, with the great dams and 
irrigation works as its symbols. One could say also that the 
problem of East and West, in its nineteenth-century form, has 
been abolished : new divisions in the world have been created. 
You have, then, a new sort of nationalism, a new popular 
nationalism, dynamic, with its necessities but also with its diffi- 
culties and dangers : the danger of conflict, the danger of self- 
worship and the danger of the denial of the individual in the 
interest, real or imagined, of social welfare. Again in some cir- 
cumstances you have the possibility of this idea being pushed to 
the extreme of nihilism. What are the factors in the modern 
world, in the new nation-states which incline this new popular 
nationalism towards the revolution of nihilism and what are the 
other factors which may make it possible to achieve what 
Professor Polanyi has called a 'suspended logic', or a 'will to 
live together'? 

HANS KOHN: . . . the indispensable democratic legitimation . . , 

Professor Liithy spoke, above all, about the European situa- 
tion. There Nationalism to a certain extent fulfilled its purpose 
of acting as a medium of integration whereas in Asia, Africa and 
in Latin- America today Nationalism provides what might be 
called 'the Democratic Legitimation indispensable for every 
government today'. In Asia or Africa or Latin- America, a stable 
government of any kind is unthinkable today without this 
'legitimation'. Only where the existing government whether 

113 



Criticism and Discussion 

it be a "colonial government 5 , or a traditional government 
only where autocracies have not adjusted in time to the changing 
conditions, nationalism has taken a violent character. On the 
whole, I would say, from the experience of forty years of study 
of Asian and Middle-Eastern nationalism that the transition has 
been much more smoothly done than I would have thought 
possible. Nationalism is an answer to rapid social and above all 
psychological transformations in Asia, Africa and Latin- 
America, and 1 think that only Nationalism can find there a 
fairly general acceptance as a means of integration. On the 
other hand, and there I would agree with Professor Liithy, the 
situation in Europe which had come to the very same process 
150 years ago is very different. As to Nationalism in the Com- 
munist orbit, I would like to recall that when the Russians 
resisted the German aggression in 1941-2 Stalin did not make 
any appeal whatsoever to ideas of social justice or Marxism, but 
purely to what might be called Great Russian Patriotism and 
called not upon the fighters of the revolution but upon the ' great 
ancestors', among them Christian saints, feudal princes and 
czarist generals. 



WALTHER HOFER: . . . in Africa, we have ' independentism* . . . 

I think it is very risky for Mr. Liithy, in his paper, to reject 
deliberately, from the start, the idea of any differentiation 
between what we may call constructive or justifiable nationalism 
and what the terrorist ideologies call nationalism. All of us agree 
with what he said about that kind of nationalism. But if we 
lump together all the historical phenomena that have been con- 
nected with the concept of nationalism, I do not think we shall 
be helping to make history comprehensible; for we shall be 
bringing into juxtaposition things which in my opinion, even if 
our ideas of the situation are inadequate, should be kept as far 
apart as may be. Mr. Kohn has already pointed out and here I 
feel sure Mr. Liithy agrees with us that there was, after all, a 
stage of historical development when nationalism did not pro- 
mote disintegration, when its influence was not destructive 
when it contributed to integration by assembling the political 
rubble of separatism into viable units. I need only mention the 
nineteenth century, with the examples of Germany, Italy, the 

114 



Criticism and Discussion 

United States of America too, if you Iike 5 and on a smaller scale, 
our common fatherland, the Swiss Confederation, to which Mr. 
Liithy, too, makes some references in his paper. Mr. Liithy said 
that the world that came to an end in 1914-18 was one which 
could think only in terms of nationalism. I think another mis- 
understanding might arise here. In my opinion there has so far 
been only one period in the history of Europe where the nation- 
alist principle really dominated as far as was possible in the 
circumstances, and that was the period between the two world 
wars. Mr. Liithy rightly mentioned the disastrous consequences 
of the dismemberment of the Eastern empires the Austro- 
Hungarian, the Russian, the Ottoman and pointed out that 
the slogan, or principle of the right of peoples to self-determina- 
tion did not finally lead to any durable order of things. But 
whether, because of that, we should totally reject that idea, and 
the attempts it led to, seems to me to be a very different ques- 
tion. I think we should not be too pedagogic in our attitude 
towards history ; I think we should not overlook the fact that 
the communities established in 1919, and more especially the 
steady, organized course that certain of them seemed to be 
following from 1925 onwards, had a very good chance of pro- 
ducing permanent historical effects. Our experience of the 
Second World War and the utterly pathological, almost unimag- 
inable National Socialist regime in Germany do not entitle us 
to assume that the statesmen of 1920 should have anticipated 
such a development for it lay right outside the framework of 
European history, even of world history. 

Mr. Liithy very rightly complains, and so do others, that the 
concept of nationalism seems to have lost all substance nowa- 
days and that it is no longer possible to put forward any positive 
definition of it. He was right, too, in saying that in the field of 
international law, "United Nations' is now the accepted term, 
so that every political structure which is admitted to the United 
Nations is automatically regarded as a nation. All the same, 
ladies and gentlemen, I consider that we should be extremely 
wary about applying the word * nationalism 9 to what is going on, 
for instance, in Africa south of the Sahara. When Mr. Liithy 
mentions the existence of an African nationalism a continent- 
wide nationalism and then the existence of separate nation- 
alisms in the Congo, the Cameroons, Ghana, Guinea and so 
forth, and then also the existence of tribal nationalisms, I begin 

115 



Criticism and Discussion 

to ask myself what kind of a concept It is that can fit them all. 
I do not flatter myself that I can delete the term from the inter- 
national vocabulary ; but I personally would be chary of describ- 
ing all these as nationalism. I think the concept that fits them all 
is a diiierent one ; we might call it the emancipation movement, 
we might call it the movement for political autonomy ; if you 
insist on an 'ism we can coin a horrible new one and call it 
'independentism* ; or what you will. But not nationalism, for as 
Mr. Liithy took particular care to point out today, these regions, 
consisting for the most part of former colonial administrative 
units, now to become nations or States within their old frontiers, 
have none of the objective features which we, in the course of 
European history, have come to associate with nationality. 
And we must not overlook the fact that the national groups in 
Europe, within the supra-national or multi-national empires, 
existed as actual historical units before ever they achieved 
political autonomy. Whereas in Africa it is usually the other way 
round a certain territory achieves political autonomy and is 
admitted to the United Nations as a State, although it possesses 
not one objective feature that would justify its being designated 
as a national group or nation in the traditional sense. 

A. K. BROHI:... ideals are the masculine principle of history . . . 

I think the greatest historian of Europe, Mr. Fisher, in his intro- 
duction to the history of Europe, said that nationalism realizes 
the post-Protestant phenomenon in Europe. It was after the 
revolt against the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope in Rome 
revolt that was established in the name of the principalities and 
feudal aristocracies that prevailed in Europe that nationalism 
manifested itself. It just came to be as an event in history. There 
was not a conscious participation in history in terms of some 
ideas having triumphed. History can be divided into two chap- 
ters : the first in which human conduct whether in its individu- 
alized or in its collective aspect is sanctioned by religion ; that 
is an external sanction. The post-Protestant phenomenon in 
Europe inaugurates a new chapter in human history in that the 
locus of the sanctioning power is not outside the individual but is 
within him. It is really thereafter that human history, in any 
fundamental sense, is made. Before then there was no history. 
Human history, in so far as it is responsible, conscious, in so far 

116 



Criticism and Discussion 

as the human individual participates and makes history is a post- 
Protestant phenomenon and fundamentally your European 
civilization is Protestant in that sense. To the extent to which 
that consciousness becomes alert, to the extent to which the 
mind becomes rational and is able to deal with enormous irra- 
tional forces which are still operating in history, and constitute 
its feminine principle, to that extent conscious participation 
makes it appear that the ideals of enlightened men have found 
an incarnation and an embodiment in human history. 

When we speak about Asian nationalism and African nation- 
alism, the problem seems to me to be simple. Much of that 
nationalism was inspired by the expansion of the liberal ideals 
of the West. Most of the pioneers of national movements in the 
national democracies of Asia and Africa were men educated in 
the cradle of European civilization. And, consequently, the 
national movements are imitative in Asia. But that is not the 
whole story : although they began that way, they are coming into 
their own. There is a triumphant ascendancy of those ideals. 
They become more and more associated with material realiza- 
tions. I think that ideals are the masculine principle of history, 
but mere masculinity is not creative ; it has to have a feminine 
complement and that feminine complement is furnished by the 
irrational forces, by the passive, material setting of history. 
Once man assumes the responsibility of his capacity to fertilize 
the currents of history, once he sees that the creative process 
depends on himself, he becomes a responsible historical agent 
and is participating in history. 

PIETER GEYL: . . .a natural reaction to the denial of fundamental 
rights . . . 

Mr. Liithy's paper looks like a diatribe against nationalism. 
And yet towards the end, he says that he does in the least question 
the strength or justification of specifically national phenomena 
or of those rooted in national traditions. He seems quite sympa- 
thetic to the demand for autonomy by cultural, religious or even 
simply regional units for individual freedom of thought or 
behaviour, permitting individuals as well as historical and 
social groups to breathe and develop freely, but he adds that 
such a demand is not in essence nationalistic. Maybe. The word 
has crude, unpleasant associations and I have myself grown 

117 



Criticism and Discussion 

weary of using it In a positive sense as 1 used to do in all inno- 
cence during a large part of my life. In all Innocence, for not only 
don't I hold now, but I never held any of these objectionable 
opinions which Mr. Liithy associates with nationalism. I have 
never been sufficiently naive to have believed that a nation arose 
from the Instinctive action of a native soul 1 don't even know 
what a native soul is I care very little for rights and institutions 
for the training of national feelings, I detest anything in the 
nature of a terrorist ideology that imposes conformity of 
thought and behaviour in fact I regard such conformity as 
quite undesirable and I don't think that it ought to go with the 
conception of nationality. As for enmity, suspicion or prejudice 
towards other national groups, I am not In the least inclined to 
foster any of these feelings. I may say that, even during the occu- 
pation of Holland, when I was Interned by the occupying auth- 
orities for three and a half years, 1 never allowed myself to 
become anti-German. I held fast to the distinction between 
National Socialism and the German people. If I may continue to 
speak personally, I do not regard the Dutch nation as the salt of 
the earth, or the Dutch language as the most beautiful In the 
world. I do not shun contact with other national ways of 
thinking ; I do not want to Isolate Holland behind a Chinese wall 
of self-complacency. Nevertheless, I feel that a Dutchman 
should not try to get rid of Ms 'Dutchness'. We must remain 
Dutch in order to be Europeans. 

Now, judging by the passage I quoted in which lie admitted 
the right of regional communities to breathe and develop freely, 
Mr. Liithy must feel some sympathy with this attitude of mind. 
But let me point out that this fundamental right is very often 
disregarded by the larger groups or states in which a small 
cultural or linguistic community has by the accidental course of 
history, become incorporated. Nothing is more inevitable, and 
justified, than that such a community should not tamely submit 
to the denial of its freedom to breathe and develop. It seems to 
me unrealistic to demand of it that it should appeal only to 
general human rights when it feels that Its own collective rights 
are at stake. (And often enough, it will find nothing but indiffer- 
ence on the part of other and more powerful groups.) I submit to 
Mr. Liithy, then, that in the struggle for its rights, nationalism, 
that he has held up to scorn, very often signs its origin ; its appear- 
ance may still be unpleasant but It Is well to remember neverthe- 

118 



Criticism and Discussion 

less that in many cases it is the natural response to the denial of 
fundamental rights. I am confining myself, as you will notice, to 
an examination of the problem of nationalism of oppressed 
or at least somewhat unequally treated national groups. 

In my youth as a member of the Flemish nationalist move- 
ment I had to wage a war on two fronts, against the indifference 
of Dutch public opinion, on one hand, and against the extrem- 
ists that shoved themselves within the movement, on the other 
hand. 'Death to Belgians', Flanders to be joined with Holland 
in one great Netherland state, demands which flew in the face of 
history and practical politics. Then when in 1933 National 
Socialism came into power in Germany, many of the war- 
impatient and unbalanced Flemish nationalists fell under that 
pernicious influence. Before the war broke out, I had become 
isolated, I learned the hard lesson that nationalism, however 
natural and needful it may be, has a tendency towards extrem- 
ism. I saw the same thing in Ireland, I saw it in South Africa. 
There were men among the Flemish nationalists who knew 
where to stop, but many of them did not. So I learned the hard 
lesson. Do I now draw the conclusion that the nationalist move- 
ment was a mistake from the beginning? And that I ought never 
to have meddled with it? Certainly not. In the end, a minority 
of the Flemish nationalists collaborated with the Germans, the 
nationalists themselves were only a fraction of the Flemish 
movement, and what the misguided extremists, intoxicated by 
the slogans of nationalism and absolutism, destroyed, was not 
Belgium or the peace of the world, they destroyed themselves 
and the nationalist party. But in the twenties, this party had 
made a powerful contribution to the regeneration of the Flem- 
ish people, to the breaking of the ascendancy of the denation- 
alized upper classes in Flanders, to paving the way for a closer 
and a culturally fruitful contact between Flanders and Holland, 
and I remember my close association with it gratefully, and I 
may say not without some pride. 

HUGH SETON-WATSON: . . the Soviet way of dealing with the 
national question , . . 

Two distinctions emerge from what we have heard. One is 

between nationalism as an historical force in Europe, and 

nationalism as a growing contemporary force in Asia and Africa, 

119 



Criticism and Discussion 

and the second is between a movement for national independ- 
ence and on the other hand, nationalism as an intolerant doc- 
trine in power, using the means of power to oppress other 
people. It seems very striking that the nationalist movement 
which came into free expression for a few days in Hungary and 
somewhat less openly for several months in Poland, was an 
astonishing kind of reversion to the liberal nationalism of the 
middle of the nineteenth century. I mean the events in Hungary 
in 1956 were almost a fantastic repetition of 1848 : we had the 
same combination of a desire for liberty, with the willingness to 
respect other people's liberty and indeed I think probably, a 
greater willingness on the part of the Hungarian revolution of 
1956 to respect the liberty of others than was shown by the 
Hungarian revolutionaries of Kossuth in 1848, who did not 
show much respect when they came to the point of the liberties 
of Croats, Slovaks or other nations. The Hungarian revolution 
has been retrospectively damned by the Soviets as a Fascist 
movement and the endless repetition of this calumnious slogan 
eventually had a certain effect on the minds of West European 
liberals and socialists who ought to have known better. This is a 
regrettable fact, but it should not make us blind to the truth, 
which was that this was a kind of liberal, libertarian nationalism 
returning to the best traditions. And now, we may look at the 
Afro-Asians. The problem is very different, I think. The point 
which I would like to stress is that the peoples of Asia and 
Africa, and particularly the more recent nationalists of tropical 
Africa, are bound to come up against all the problems that 
nationalists came up against in Europe. They don't seem to 
realize it sufficiently, and this is a thing which somewhat alarms 
me. I have lately studied Soviet literature on Africa, particu- 
larly the Soviet Journal of Ethnography and certain oriental 
studies which devote an enormous amount of attention to the 
problems of linguistic nationalism and of multi-national states. 
The Soviets have built up a very complicated and rather 
interesting theory, based to some extent on the history of the old 
Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union, on the evolution of 
tribes into national groups, national groups into nationalities 
and nationalities into nations. The theory is very clear, if one 
studied the subject : their aims are to use the multi-lingual and 
multi-national characters of the African states to create division 
and to play them off against each other and eventually impose 

120 



Criticism and Discussion 

on all a uniform pattern of Soviet nationality policy. Now the 
Soviets have their own ready-made formula for dealing with the 
national question and their aim is to encourage a development 
in Africa, and in Asia too, of units of a type which they have 
experienced and manipulated. You impose a totalitarian regime, 
you encourage a free development for the expression of correct 
orthodox opinions in all the languages that are spoken; you 
then proclaim that, unlike in the past, this society is now based 
on a complete brotherhood of all nations in the state who are no 
longer oppressing each other, but are brothers, all equal before 
the law. You proclaim this with a vast propaganda machine. 
At the same time, you keep the masses of the people mobilized 
in constant demonstrations and public proclamations of this 
brotherhood, until the combination of mass propaganda, use of 
the native language and the whole totalitarian set-up does in 
fact deal with the problem. Now, it really is striking, con- 
sidering that the Moslem peoples of the Soviet Union are sur- 
rounded by independent Turkey, Persia, Pakistan, Afghanistan 
and are not so far from India, in all of which countries nation- 
alism is a strong force, that the people of Soviet central Asia 
have been kept in fact immune to any influence from the other 
countries. 

One might, I think, argue that France could solve the Algerian 
problem in this manner, using this combination of mobilization, 
propaganda and preaching of a synthetic doctrine of brother- 
hood and totalitarian set-up, but on one condition, of course, 
that is, that the whole people of France became totalitarian, too. 
And this is a price which the French people will, I think, never 
pay and God forbid that they should! I am just saying this to 
show that this sort of thing could be done elsewhere and I sup- 
pose if the French Communist party were allowed by Moscow 
to control Algeria as a matter of tactical convenience, it would 
in fact try it. 

My last point is that the problem of the multi-national state, 
the problem of linguistic division and the domination of one 
language group over another language group, is a problem with 
which we are going to have to live for a very long time. There is 
no ready-made solution of any kind and our friends in Asia and 
Africa are going to have to deal with this problem. I have only 
sympathy for them in their efforts to find a solution, but please 
let us get away from any kind of idea that the experience of 

121 



Criticism and Discussion 

Europe or the experience of Asia Is unique or that there is any- 
thing special about the African personality which makes it 
immune to these difficulties. It seems to me that the doctrine of 
racialism, of racial superiority or inferiority is odious and 
utterly unacceptable in any form, including its inverted form, 
and just as it is utterly insufferable that the White South 
Africans should say that the Bantus, because they are Bantus, 
are inferior, so I think it is utterly insufferable that the Africans 
should think that, because they are Africans, they are immune to 
these problems of linguistic division themselves or that imperi- 
alism is something of which only white people are capable. 

JEANNE HERSCH: . . . nationalism has lost its substantial 
reality . . . 

I do not agree with Mr. Brohi, that real history begins with the 
Reformation. I quite agree that from the standpoint from which 
he approaches the matter, the Reformation constitutes a deci- 
sive turning-point. But I do not think we can say that it repre- 
sents the beginning of conscious history, because then we 
should have to concede that conscious history began with a 
radical distinction, a struggle, between the two the masculine 
and the feminine principles involved. Whereas I believe that 
there was a kind of affectionate thought, of thinking affection 
that there was a thoughtful way of loving, a loving way of 
thinking; and I do not believe we can date the inception of 
history from the more radical disruption of those links. 

The real human revolutions are undertaken on behalf of 
beloved things, or beings, with the intention of enabling them to 
exist. In other words, change is effected out of love for some- 
thing which exists under inappropriate circumstances, but 
which does exist. 

And now, what about nationalism? I think nationalism has 
changed its sex. At certain periods of past history, nationalism 
had a weighty feminine aspect. At certain other periods though 
this is a mere outline and I cannot go into much detail it was 
probably, so to speak, a couple, with a dual life. And nowadays 
nationalism, even when it arises in the countries that are seeking 
independence for the first time, is a male principle, in the mean- 
ing we have attributed to it; in other words, it is an ideology; 
in fact it is a pass-word, a sign a banner, if you like. It has 

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Criticism and Discussion 

divested Itself of Its former material substance. And I think that 
nationalism can no longer., as Mr, Polanyi's paper Mnts 5 act as a 
revival of substance and weight on the political and Ideological 
horizon of the present day. 

In this respect I entirely agree with Mr. Liithy ; we have to in- 
vent something else. But that brings us up against the paradox 
Inherent In our situation a paradox that dooms our discus- 
sions, however Intelligent and Interesting they may be, to a 
sterility not confined to our meeting here, but extending to the 
whole present-day effort to think things out. For the fact Is that 
we are trying to arrive by way of thought by an effort of subtle, 
detached thought at a weight of attachment which cannot be 
reached, Invented, suggested by thought. It is almost as though 
we were trying to create something ancient, to conceive of some- 
thing substantial and give substance to our conception. And 
that, in my opinion, Is the essential difficulty that confronts us 
today in our search for what we feel we lack and must have. 
Mr. Liithy suggested that federalism might be the path to take. 
In my opinion It is the only proper path on the level on which 
the problem of nationalism arises ; but that proper path, the 
path of federalism, must be correctly understood, so as never to 
lose sight of the element of weight and of established, long- 
standing fact that must be Included in It. 

CZESLAW MILOSZ: . . . the content depends on the social 
structure . . . 

I am a Pole and every Pole is a rabid nationalist and Is lacking In 
International feeling, so I am in a happy position here that, not 
being a scholar who looks at national problems from a detached 
attitude, I can jump with both my feet into the pie. If I under- 
stand Mr. Liithy well, he would like to purify the struggle for 
Independence in Africa and Asia from the stain of nationalism 
or of nationalist doctrines as they were elaborated in Europe. 
In any case, this is a question of terminology, because in Con- 
tinental Europe we use the term 'nationalism' to designate a 
certain national doctrine while, in the Anglo-Saxon world, It 
has a different meaning. I agree completely with Mr. Liithy that 
In Europe we never use the term 'nationalism' because it has 
very unpleasant connotations. Progressive movements of the 
beginning of the nineteenth century became more and more 
i 123 



Criticism and Discussion 

reactionary and bloodthirsty up to recent times and we wit- 
nessed many terrible things during the last war. Yet even in the 
national doctrine immediately preceding the last war, we should 
make certain distinctions. It depended very much upon the 
structure of a given society. In such purely peasant societies as 
the Baltic States or the Ukraine, nationalism had a clear class 
character, it was a peasant nationalism and, curiously enough, 
it was connected with a movement of creating co-operatives, not 
co-operatives in the kolkhoz sense, but organizations for the 
marketing of agricultural products. One basic and important 
factor has not been mentioned here, connected with what is 
called today mass culture. We have been witnessing during our 
lifetime a progressive russification of Russia: I mean that a 
Russian who before the Revolution had a very small share in the 
Russian national heritage, became, through millions of editions 
of so-called Russian classics, much more Russian than he was 
before the Revolution. This phenomenon repeats itself every- 
where and is very clearly visible in the eastern part of Europe 
with the consequence that Poles become more Polish, Hungar- 
ians more Hungarian* Russians more Russian. From this point 
of view, I find that a study of the time of Pushkin, at the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century, can teach us much more about 
the present development in Russia than the study of Marx. 
This factor introduces enormous changes and we witness a 
breakdown of nationalist doctrines as they were elaborated 
before the last war. For instance, in such countries as Poland or 
Hungary, the whole nationalist doctrine was completely broken 
down and suppressed, in my opinion with rather happy results. 
So it is no wonder that national feelings visible in the Hungarian 
Revolution bore some features of the big uprising of '48, because 
the national reactionary doctrine broke down in such countries 
as Hungary or Poland, while national feeling has taken other, 
more attractive forms. Thus I would reproach one thing to Mr. 
Liithy : his detached attitude, his lack of sympathy for national- 
ism, are by no means his peculiar characteristics and they were 
shared by many progressive minds in Eastern Europe, They 
fought against nationalistic doctrines but the result was that 
they were throwing away the baby together with the bath- water. 
The tragedy of many Polish progressive movements was that 
they abandoned the monopoly of national feeling to the most 
reactionary and right-wing circles, the error for instance of Rosa 

124 



Criticism and Discussion 

Luxemburg, who did not take into account the particular nat- 
ional factors, was one of the reasons for the total defeat of the 
Polish Communist Party. It is a general tendency of inter- 
national Socialism and Communism to neglect what is particular 
of a certain situation in a given country and it explains their 
falling completely under the rule of the Kremlin. 

EHSAN KARACHI: . . . traditional roots . . . 

Nationalism had been referred to as a calamity ; certain forms of 
it have been extolled, others have been deplored. I think this is a 
rather abstract approach to the problem. At any rate, as far as 
the Middle East and my own country Iran are concerned, I 
can safely say that nationalism has frequently been a movement 
grouping and assembling the most various elements, and that it 
has represented both a tribute to the feeling of justice, of law- 
ful, democratic government and a tribute to the ideals of the 
past. I therefore disagree with my friend Professor Hourani 
when he says that Middle Eastern nationalism is too ration- 
alistic and nihilistic. 

I would say that if Middle Eastern nationalism had not been 
rooted in tradition and impelled by religious force, it could never 
have succeeded as a movement. Take Iran as an example, even 
though it is true that conditions were different there from 
those in other Arab countries, because Iran had never been 
occupied by a foreign colonial power. In 1906, when the first 
democratic movements for the establishment of a lawful, demo- 
cratic government were launched, there was a surge of anti- 
foreign feeling as a reaction against Russian pressure; but at the 
same time there was considerable religious support; it was the 
priests, the mullahs, who were in the forefront of this movement 
and who extolled the religious principles of the Koran, accusing 
the Government of abandoning those principles and of lapsing 
into nihilism. The subsequent movements, too, were inspired 
to a great extent by religious feelings. I would say that in the 
Middle East the prime consideration is the search for lawful 
government and a feeling of justice, rather than an inspiration 
towards social and economic development. 

This is a point on which our Western friends are often 
mistaken. The Middle East does not begin by calculations, those 
countries do not look at problems in the same way as the West 

125 



Criticism and Discussion 

does : questions of national income, investment and so forth 
are often the calculations of experts, which do not reflect the 
feelings of those whose foremost aspiration is to arrive at a 
measure of lawful government. 

ALTIERO SPINELLI: . . .patriotism and nationalism . . . 

I do not know whether nationalism is male or female ; but what- 
ever its sex may be it undoubtedly manages to have a great many 
husbands or a great many wives. For if we regard nationalism as 
a certain feeling of solidarity among the members of a partic- 
ular group of people solidarity which is usually based on 
language and tradition, solidarity which in some cases is felt 
only by an elite, while in other cases it extends to large sections of 
the population we find that it may serve as a principle of inte- 
gration, or that it may play a part in various combinations. In 
some instances the purpose of nationalism is to promote a 
certain separatism, to defend the autonomy of a particular 
group within an established political system ; this is the case with 
the Flemish national movement. Then there is another nation- 
alism, which is prompted by the definite wish to become 
independent of a foreign power, as for instance, Italian 
nationalism. German nationalism, on the other hand, was not 
directed against any foreign power. Nationalism of former 
colonial peoples is a search for freedom and so are nationalist 
forces within the Soviet Empire. There is also a nationalism which 
is the factor of human solidarity resulting directly from the 
dangers of wartime, summoned up by the appeals to tradition, 
by exhortations to defend home, parents, etc. This form of 
nationalism is to be met with everywhere where there is a war 
going on even under regimes which are not and do not wish to 
be nationalistic; Russian leaders, for instance, appealed during 
the war to national feeling, though with some degree of cold 
political calculation, that is to say with the desire to make use of 
a certain form of integration additional to that which was really 
the raison d'etre of the system itself. 

In all these cases, defence of a cultural system, desire for inde- 
pendence, defence against military aggression, nationalism or 
one might say patriotism has its attractive aspects. It also has 
less attractive aspects, for it frequently incites people to hate 
their fellow-men simply because they speak a different language 

126 



Criticism and Discussion 

and have different traditions ; but I would say that In any event 
it Is never unduly dangerous. In cases where It Is directed against 
established authority it even has a certain absolute value, 
because it is always a good thing for the established authority to 
encounter a certain resistance. 

But we have been led, in our own day, to speak of nationalism 
as a poison, an illness, because nationalism can form yet another 
affinity ; it may become the principle that upholds authority, it 
may ally itself to the established authority ; and I think the word 
'nationalism 5 should be reserved for such cases as this, the term 
'patriotism 5 being used for the others. Nationalism In this sense 
was bom not very long ago ; I would even say that It was In- 
vented by the French during the French Revolution, when they 
abolished the legitimacy of royalty. During the French Revo- 
lution the Girondlns tried to establish the principle of a com- 
munity based on freedom ; but this experiment soon collapsed 
whereas It had proved successful in America a few years 
earlier. The nation was set up In place of the king. The nation 
was the legitimate embodiment of authority. The French Revo- 
lution gave rise to two parallel types of legitimate authority, 
national and democratic the will of the people and the will of 
the nation. And that has survived until the present day, when 
we see that the man who wields the power in France, de Gaulle, 
believes that the French people are merely confirming a legiti- 
mate authority which is not constituted by the French people 
but by France by the nation. 

After the French had invented this principle almost involun- 
tarily, because in its early days the French Revolution wanted to 
be cosmopolitan It was applied in other European countries 
and developed Into a malady that spread all over the continent. 
I think Liithy was correct in saying that during the nineteenth 
and twentieth centuries it acted as the principle of organization, 
of integration, in the system of European communities. This 
does not mean that it found universal application ; but we find in 
history that whenever a movement succeeded in invoking the 
national principle as its justification for starting a war, for 
destroying one State or creating another, there was always a 
prejudice in its favour. And that favourable prejudice continued 
right up to the end of the attempt to unite all Germans in the 
Third Reich. Even when Hitler wanted to seize Austria, the 
Sudetenland and so forth, the rest used to say 'After all, what 

127 



Criticism and Discussion 

he wants is quite fair' in accordance with the principle that all 
the members of a nation must belong to one State and that the 
raison d'etre of a State is the nation. 

Now when a State is based on the nation it has an inevitable 
tendency towards totalitarianism towards a situation in which 
the individual citizen becomes a mere tool which has to obey 
the established authority because that authority is serving the 
nation that new idea, one might almost say that new divinity. 
The experience that Europe has undergone, was and still is for 
we have not yet emerged from it a fundamentally negative 
experience. This experience should compel us to meditate over 
our history in order to show what were the fatal elements first 
in the Italian and German movements, and then in the First 
World War, which checked the attempt to endow Europe with a 
supra-national organization. It was an attempt which began in 
1815 in Vienna and which might have had further developments. 
We Europeans should feel a certain obligation to warn the new 
States which are now being formed in Africa and Asia against 
this danger, by constantly reminding them that it is one thing to 
have a community with certain characteristics and traditions 
which this community wishes to defend and is entitled to defend 
a community on the principle of placing the authority at the 
service of the citizens, since this is the foundation of freedom ; 
and that it is quite a different thing though the tendency easily 
arises, because patriotic feelings exist everywhere to seek for 
the principle of integration along the easier road by saying 'Let 
us try to form a nation'. There may always be a tendency to 
consider that it doesn't matter very much if the nation does not 
exist at the outset if there are only separate tribes with different 
traditions. The most firmly-established nation in the world to- 
day is the French nation; and it is one which was created by the 
central authority. In the case of the Italians, the nation may be 
said to have existed before the State ; but that cannot be said of 
France, for France was created by the French State. In a con- 
tinent like Africa, where every possibility still lies open, new 
paths may be chosen, but there is also the risk that undesirable 
examples may be followed, in ignorance of the dangers. It would 
be very dangerous if the idea were to gain ground that national- 
ism, of no matter what kind that of Senegal, that of the Congo, 
that of Africa as a whole should be the foundation of the 
State. That is a negative principle and should be rejected. 

128 



Criticism and Discussion 
FRANgois BONDY: . . the impracticable German national- 



ism 



I feel that here in Berlin it is not possible to talk about nation- 
alism in general, without saying a few words about the very 
special and very central problem of 'German nationalism 9 . For 
when I heard Professor Hofer say just now that there had been 
certain instances of successful national integration during the 
nineteenth century, I was reminded that yesterday, at a very 
stirring meeting held on that very stirring date June 17th the 
Prime Minister of a German 'Land' said that the relations 
between Germany and Poland should be based on the fact that 
certain frontiers had been established by treaties in the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries. The Poles among us were ex- 
tremely surprised, and there were others, too, who felt no 
inclination to support this German claim, because so much has 
happened since the fifteenth century, and particularly in our own 
century. When we think of the twentieth century and of the 
nineteenth, we have to recognize that there have been many 
instances of the successful integration of a people into a State 
and nation. By and large it was, I think, successful in France ; it 
succeeded in the Scandinavian countries partly through inte- 
gration and partly through disintegration ; it went without say- 
ing in the British Isles, and to a certain extent the Irish have 
brought it off too. The same applies to Italy, Spain and Por- 
tugal. But there is one country in Europe in the centre of 
Europe, its greatest continental power, Germany where inte- 
gration has, in my opinion, never succeeded and never can 
succeed. When one reflects on the fact that nationalism is insuffi- 
cient for Europe as a formative and liberating principle, it seems 
to me that Germany inevitably comes to mind. In 1848 the 
democratic idea of German unification was shared by all Ger- 
man-speaking peoples ; the Alsatians approved of it, the Ger- 
man-speaking Austrians approved of it, and in France the Left, 
the democrats, went much further than Bismarck. Marx and 
Engels were ready to launch a campaign against all Germany's 
neighbours and to see the Czech language abolished, for the 
sake of this historical unity of the German language. But nothing 
came of it. When the German national idea is identified with the 
German language it has to take an imperialistic form. As 
certain historians, such as Golo Mann and Ludwig DeMo, have 

129 



Criticism and Discussion 

shown, there are always two alternative demands : either for a 
German Reich established according to the historical frontiers 3 
which means including peoples that are not German-speaking ; 
or for a German Reich based on the German language, which 
means including peoples which have no desire to belong to the 
German Federation' such as the Swiss, the Alsatians and so 
forth. So it seems to me that Germany, in the centre of Europe, 
constitutes a sort of camp set up among the other nations, which 
makes the national principle impossible. And precisely because 
yesterday , June 17th, we were reminded of the aspiration 
towards the reunification of the free and the oppressed Germans 
and of the German workers' uprising with which all of us 
here, of course, are in deepest sympathy I think it is a good 
thing to reflect that our feeling of solidarity arose out of the fact 
that on that occasion there were no nationalist songs and no dis- 
cordantly nationalistic note was struck ; there was undoubtedly 
a national aspiration to reunify the historic Germany that is now 
divided, but certain demands of a social, cultural and humanistic 
nature were very much to the fore. And since in the course of 
history German nationalism has been less concerned with the 
claims of humanism than other forms of nationalism, it has a 
greater need than other forms of nationalism to be elevated by 
other principles, which we might call federative ones. It is no 
mere accident that 'The Marseillaise *, although it is such a 
bloodthirsty song, sends a thrill of brotherly feeling through 
men in all the five continents, for it has a kind of universal, 
liberating attraction. Whereas as we found yesterday, the 
German national song, composed by Hoffmann von Fallers- 
leben, beautiful and noble though it is, awakens no response in 
non-Germans. German nationalism, as such, embodies a prin- 
ciple which is narrow, yet carries a certain risk of explosion ; and 
we, who look forward to liberation and freedom for all Germans 
and all other East Europeans, should stipulate that here, in par- 
ticular, this idea of liberation must be kept most carefully free 
from any discordant nationalistic note. 

THEODOR LITT: . . the European duty of the Germans . . . 

I think the hearts of all the Germans in this assembly were 
touched, for Mr. Bondy laid his finger on the whole tragedy of 

Germany's destiny and on Germany's well-known errors too. I 

130 



Criticism and Discussion 

think that in reply I can say : When we consider historical cir- 
cumstances we should be careful not to assume that a solution 
exists for every given situation. People are always going up to 
heads of States and to those responsible for deciding spiritual 
matters, and demanding that they find a solution for some com- 
plicated situation in which they are involved. I think we shall 
never have a clear grasp of history unless we realize that certain 
situations are insoluble and that the only way of dealing with 
them is to overstep the boundaries of what have hitherto been 
the accepted forms of life. The terrible fate we are suffering is 
due to the failure of the German nation to make its national 
frontiers and its political limits coincide. And I agree that we 
Germans must desist from basing our claim to frontiers to which 
we believe we have title, on historical memories. On the con- 
trary we should open our eyes to the fact that what has hap- 
pened in East Germany has led to such a confusion of territorial 
boundaries and cultural commitments, that it is impossible to 
conceive of any historical solution that might bring them to a 
completely satisfactory conclusion. We have to remember that 
the first man to present the national idea to us Germans was 
Johann Gottfried Herder. When we read what he wrote about 
the wealth of the nations and the fullness of the divine life that 
manifests itself in the course of historical existence, we see at 
once that nothing was further from his mind than to put forward, 
on behalf of the nation, any kind of claim to political frontiers. 
It is bad enough that in the course of its development, 
and especially within the last forty years, the German nation 
should have strayed so far from this free and open interpretation 
of nationality. We have indeed paid dearly for that. But one 
thing seems clear to me ; that in a world that is struggling to find 
its form, we Germans cannot expect to find a satisfactory place 
for ourselves anywhere, unless we make a determined return to 
the greatness, the richness and freedom of Herder's interpreta- 
tion of the nation. That interpretation, it seems to me, would 
also show us that we can find a satisfactory existence only in a 
world and in a Europe where the frontiers of individual States 
have become a secondary consideration. So long as State 
frontiers are regarded as setting up a division between the 
people who live on either side of them, there can be no satisfac- 
tory coexistence between different nations. And this leads me to 
the opinion that if we are now to struggle for the concept of 

131 



Criticism and Discussion 

Europe and the form Europe is to take In future, we Germans, 
by reason of our terrible sufferings in the course of history, 
should come forward as the chief representatives of the pure, 
ideal concept of Europe ; for it represents our only prospect of 
achieving a satisfactory existence from the political standpoint 
as well. And if this meeting has helped the German participants 
to become more aware of this historical mission, it will have 
been no small practical achievement. 

FRODE JAKOBSEN \ ...in Asia, a feeling of responsibility . . . 

I had an experience in the Philippines a year ago which was 
something very enlightening for me, as a European visiting 
Asia for the first time. It brought home to me our frequent habit 
of calling quite different things by the same name, which is a 
source of misunderstanding. Professor Liithy said that not all 
the efforts to achieve independence can be described as nation- 
alism in our sense of the word. I would go a bit further, for my 
experience was that suddenly, in conversation with people who 
called themselves Philippine nationalists, I realized that the term 
nationalism meant something quite different for them from 
what I had supposed. I had come to these people in a sceptical 
mood, because I am well acquainted with European nation- 
alism. But if you ask me to explain what nationalism meant for 
them, I would say that it meant having a sense of responsibility 
not only for one's own family which may be customary in 
Asia or for a group of some kind, but for the whole nation, 
Their nationalism was in no way opposed to internationalism, 
competition with other nations played no part in it ; it even had 
nothing to do with the fight for independence. They called them- 
selves nationalists, and their nationalism consisted in that they 
enlightened and prosperous townspeople used to go out to 
poverty-stricken villages to show the village women how to 
nourish their children better, and thus reduce the high infantile 
mortality rate ; to show the peasants how to build houses that 
are healthier to live in, and how to plant rice so as to get the best 
yield from it. Thus there are people we call nationalists, 
and who call themselves nationalists, who define nationalism as a 
feeling of responsibility not only for oneself, for one's own 
family, but for the larger unit known as the nation. This kind of 
nationalism builds up a nation from within and need not, as we 

132 



Criticism and Discussion 

are apt to assume, have anything to do with foreign countries. I 
saw that very clearly In the Philippines. But I think I came 
across the same thing In other parts of Asia as well. Nation- 
alism in the bad sense Is to be found In Asia too, of course 1 

have no illusions as to that. But I feel that we In the West should 
pay more heed to this particular element in what is known as 
nationalism. 



RICHARD LOWENTHAL: . . . the nation is formed by democratic 
participation . . . 

I am one of those who consider that the feeling or consciousness 
of nationality plays a more positive role than Mr. Liithy be- 
lieves. But I think his paper did great service by calling attention 
to the dangerous vagueness of the concept of nationality as a 
criterion for the creation of a State. If one rejects as Mr. Liithy 
does, as I do, and as I believe all of us in this assembly do the 
nationalistic view of the metaphysics of history ; if we refuse to 
believe that the various nations are directly God-given, that they 
existed from the beginning of history although they only gradu- 
ally awoke to the realization that their common blood or com- 
mon speech had set each of them apart, once and for all : if we 
reject all this, then the question that naturally arises, as it has 
now arisen so acutely in connection with Africa, for example, Is 
the question of how one defines a nation, or how a nation de- 
fines itself. And it seems to me that we have not yet produced a 
completely satisfactory answer to that question, except Professor 
Geyl in one of his comments. The point is that a nation is not 
something that has existed from the very first : a nation is 
brought into being by certain typical historical events, by those 
events which determine in what form, at what stage and within 
what boundaries a community awakens to a realization that its 
members are participants in all its concerns. In other words, a 
nation's first awareness of itself as such, and its awareness of 
democracy are closely-related historical developments. Pro- 
fessor Geyl himself belongs to a nation that offers a very 
admirable example of this. If we try to define the Dutch from the 
point of view of language, we find that they originally spoke a 
form of Low German. The Dutch nation came to definite form 
through the fact that in the battle against the Spanish domina- 
tion, this northern part of Holland, and only this part, succeeded 

133 



Criticism and Discussion 

in winning its freedom and established democratic institutions 
for itself. We can see very similar things happening in our own 
day. There has been some mention of the German linguistic 
frontiers in this meeting. Let us consider the extremely interest- 
ing case of the German-speaking Austrians. Around and after 
1848, after the constitution of Bismarck's Reich, and even after 
1918, a great proportion of the Germans in Austria, who subse- 
quently lived in the new Austrian State, felt themselves to be 
Germans and regarded their State as a temporary structure, 
created solely as a result of the ban on union with Germany 
which was laid down in the Treaty of Versailles. After this feel- 
ing of German nationality on the part of the Austrians had been 
defeated on various occasions in 1848, in 1860-71 and in 1918 

their wish was given a semblance of fulfilment by Hitler's 

annexation of Austria. The result was that under the impression 
of this experience the Germans of Austria lost their feeling of 
being Germans and now really feel themselves to be Austrians 
members of the Austrian nation as treaties had earlier declared 
them to be, but without their being truly so. In this sense I 
believe that the question of what a nation is, does not permit of 
any hard and fast reply; the reply emerges in the course of 
historical development, and in many countries has done so only 
in our own time. There is no reason, a priori, why the boundaries 
of such nations should be iked in the light of linguistic unity. 
There is in fact no a priori criterion to determine where their 
frontiers should lie. It depends much more upon the circum- 
stances in which they attained independence, upon the develop- 
ment of their new States. Any group that can combine to set up a 
viable State in which all sections of the population can play a 
part, wiH develop into a nation. And I think it is important for 
us to recognize that there should be no attempt to anticipate 
that development by applying any particular theory on the 
subject. Now if this is so it becomes clear, it seems to me, that 
there is a great gulf between this concept of the nation as result- 
ing from a process of democratic participation, and any kind of 
metaphysical concept; and also that the democratic concept of 
what constitutes a nation does not provide any ground for 
setting up the nation as the highest value any justification for 
nationalism in the German sense of the term. 

In conclusion I would like to say something about the view 
that federalism and nationalism are contrasting terms. I think it 

134 



Criticism and Discussion 

is no accident that Mr. Liithy is Swiss. Historically speaking 
Switzerland is unique, because its democratic institutions were 
set up at a time when nationalism had not developed, and in 
federal form. I do not think it would be possible in the world of 
today, to substitute federal institutions in place of the institu- 
tions of national self-determination. Tie only possibility is to 
set them up as supra-national institutions of self-determination. 
A form of federalism that declared itself to be a nihilistic nega- 
tion of the national concept, would be inconsistent unless it 
denied democracy as well. In this sense, Metternich was the only 
consistent anti-nationalist who ever existed, 

SIDNEY HOOK: . . institutions permitting differences of qual- 
ity . . . 

The substance of this discussion confirms a principle first an- 
nounced by Aristotle and restated by a great jurist, Justice 
Holmes, who said that general principles by themselves never 
decide specific or individual cases. We grant that nationalism is a 
general expression of the right to self-determination and that 
even in some of its problematic forms it cannot be excom- 
municated. Nationalism is something like a children's disease, it 
has to be gone through to be transcended, and like children's 
diseases, the later in time a group acquires nationalism, the more 
violent its form, especially if its aspirations have been repressed. 

As a rationalist, I quite agree with Professor Litt that some 
problems may be insoluble, but I am not prepared to resign 
myself to the recognition of the problem as insoluble until we 
apply as much creative intelligence as possible to its resolution. 
I thought that Professor Jakobsen, whose experiences In the 
Philippines I shared, would call our attention to some aspect 
of this difficulty, because when I was young and naive, I always 
assumed that Scandinavian countries would illustrate the road 
by which nationalism could be transcended, but I think theirs 
are certain events, even in the history of Scandinavian countries, 
which show how difficult it is to develop a unified culture 
which would be accepted as expressing the legitimate interests of 
national groups. 

I agree with Mr. Lowenthal when he says that you can't sub- 
stitute the concept of federalism for that of nationalism. But I 
wonder whether we shouldn't use our creative, rational powers 

135 



Criticism and Discussion 

to find a new conception of federalism. So far as our delibera- 
tions have been descriptive, we have been weak in presenting 
plans for possible action and organization. Nobody has spoken 
about nationalism in America and the United States, but it pre- 
sents an interesting illustration of how a culture can be developed 
from the most plural and diverse origins ; the thirteen American 
colonies were profoundly different in religion, to some extent 
even in language, and with the immigration to the United States, 
the great problem was to forge a nation. Now that nation was 
forged with a conception that what was to unite people would 
be a certain type of institution that would permit any quality of 
difference so that no group would feel that what was legitimate 
to them in terms of cultural values would be overridden. Now 
there is some danger in that too, a conception of a melting-pot 
in which all cultures would be dipped and then they would 
emerge in some kind of shining quality undistinguishable from 
each other. But that is a difficulty that can be met in terms of 
indigenous procedures ; but particularly for Europe, Asia and 
Africa, what I think we should now turn our attention to, is a 
conception of a common administrative unit which does not 
impose upon the sense of uniqueness that each national group 
feels. 



ALBERT HOURANI: . . . there cannot be a philosophy of the 
nation . . . 

I should like to correct a misunderstanding of my position which 
Mr. Naraghi put forward when he interpreted me as saying that 
certain aspects of Asian and specifically of Middle Eastern 
nationalism were rationalistic. My thought was rather the oppo- 
site and I think everything that has been said rather confirms it. 
I am more ?nd more convinced that one can say nothing about 
nationalism in itself, because it is not a concept. Essentially, 
nationalism Is a feeling of solidarity and natural attraction 
which binds certain people together. Other people's nationalism 
is as incomprehensible, and even as absurd as other people's 
love. 

But the moral neutrality of nationalism is precisely its moral 
danger. The differences between nationalisms of today and the 
sentimental tribal solidarity of the past is that, for various social 
and technical necessities, today we have to encourage nation- 

136 



Criticism and Discussion 

alism, to formulate It articulately, to instil It In people's minds. 
We do this by putting It In words, that is to say by grafting on to 
it certain concepts which have essentially nothing to do with it, 
and this nationalism Is not Itself a concept allowing a systematic 
development, since there cannot strictly be a philosophy of the 
nation. It lies open equally to all Ideals, whether Ideals of the 
rights of man, Ideals of religion and so on. It might be thought 
that this, as Professor Hook said, is only a passing phase, 
that once nations have achieved their independence, they will 
recover from the child's disease of nationalism and will be able 
to think about something else. I don't myself believe that this Is 
so, because I think that there still are, in the present world, for 
Independent national States, problems for which it Is necessary 
and natural to try to generate a feeling of national unity and 
loyalty. 

HERBERT LUTHY: . . . nationalistic falsification of history . . . 

The chief result of this discussion has been to show that nation- 
alism cannot be defined, but that it can very well be mobilized 
and very easily be put to ill use, precisely because it cannot be 
defined. This was expressed in the papers Including, as I was 
reminded, my own because of course everyone speaks in the 
light of his own background, his own experience, his own world. 
Before this discussion someone told me that in my paper the 
Swiss schoolmaster disappeared. I don't deny it, I quite agree ; 
and it is doubly true. For one thing the schoolmaster, or rather 
the historian has done so, because to me a century of nation- 
alistic writing of history to serve the purpose of national inte- 
gration a century of nationalistic writing of history, falsifica- 
tion of history, blurring of history constitutes something so 
horrible that it often makes me feel guilty about my profession. 
Secondly, schoolmasters have been one of the chief instruments 
of nationalism in Europe, and Swiss schoolmasters, of course, 
because it is true that we are a State that arose in a pre-nation- 
alistic period, and in which what Madame Jeanne Hersch has 
defined as the female type of nationalism, which I would call 
simply a feeling of directly belonging to a small community in 
one's own land, to the community one knows and works with, 
the original, genuine community feeling has survived the 
nationalistic epoch. We live on an island, which has probably 

137 



Criticism and Discussion 

intensified our awareness of the extent to which the wide-scale 
nationalism of the nineteenth century (I repeat, wide-scale not 
by present-day standards, but by those of the period) was an 
artificial ideology fabricated, of course, in the interests of 
power-politics. From which it also follows that if we, in this 
assembly, reject nationalism as a doctrine, as a principle of inte- 
gration, that does not signify rejection of the right to existence 
of separate communities, but the recognition of that right for all 
of them. That is the meaning of federalism. And though Pro- 
fessor Geyl thought he was contradicting me, I was almost 
tempted to embrace him, because what he calls nationalism 
the right to existence of the Flemish language and the Flemish 
people is what 1 would call separatism or autonomism, the 
preliminary requisite for which is, precisely, a federative, plural- 
istic organization for coexistence which of course confirms the 
destiny of Flemish nationalism as nationalism, but also gives an 
example of the innumerable possibilities for the abuse of such a 
movement, its use as a fifth column in international affairs. 

WALTHER HOFER: . . . European colonialism and Soviet 
imperialism . . . 

We have spoken, in relation to nationalism, of the East Euro- 
pean situation, of the situation in Asia and of the situation in 
Africa. I would like to take the opportunity of this meeting, in 
which so many distinguished men and women from all over the 
world are participating, to call attention to a circumstance that 
is quite obvious, but which has not been mentioned today the 
fact that under the same international conditions in which the 
African and Asian nations have succeeded in gaining their 
freedom, the Eastern European nations have been compelled to 
give up their freedom. In the light of psychology and history we 
can well understand that, as it seems to me, a great number of 
our friends in Asia and Africa hesitate to recognize a parallel 
between European colonialism in their continents and Soviet 
imperialism in Eastern Europe. But I think we should be 
mistaken if we drew the conclusion from this, that the oppres- 
sion of the East European nations which have come under the 
Soviet yoke is not as terrible as that from which the Asian and 
African peoples were suffering. I also believe that the sympathy 
shown by the intellectuals in what is known as the Western 

138 



Criticism and Discussion 

world has played and Is still playing a great, decisive role In 
supporting the Independence movements among the African and 
Asian peoples. And I would like to appeal to our friends, the 
Asian and African Intellectuals, to do the same in their turn, by 
encouraging their own countries not to forget those nations 
which have lost their freedom at the very time when they them- 
selves were winning It. 



139 



The Role of Religion in the 
Pursuit of Freedom 

KATHLEEN BLISS 



ELIEF has its origins in belonging. We hold the beliefs we 
share about man because we belong in the European 
tradition. Can we accept articulately this belonging to 
the whole of that tradition? To some of our contemporaries the 
defeat of religion was the necessary prerequisite of man's intel- 
lectual freedom and the rise of science. The clashes that took 
place are to them the archetypes of an inevitable hostility. May 
it not, however, be the case that belief needs the acids of criti- 
cism and science the background of assured beliefs consciously 
and responsibly accepted as such (namely as beliefs and not as 
substitutes for science in its own sphere)? It is important for 
Christians to accept what Bonhoeffer wrote in his book on 
Ethics which he drafted in prison here in Berlin between 1943 
and 1945, 'Intellectual honesty in all things including questions 
of belief was the great achievement of emancipated reason and 
it has ever since been one of the indispensable moral require- 
ments of western man. Contempt for the age of rationalism is a 
suspicious sign of failure to feel the need for truthfulness.* 
What, therefore, we need to search for is not a device to help 
man to continue to feel responsible or important, but the truth 
about him as far as we are ever able, from within the human 
situation, to discover it. 

There seem to me to be two contributions at this point from 
the side of religion. In the first place and negatively, Christianity 
asks the question whether the secularized version of the Chris- 
tian story, which puts man at the centre of man's concern, does 
not deprive man of something he needs in order to be man 
an object of worship of which he can use the subMmest words 

141 



Kathleen Bliss 

without either lowering the meaning of the words or making a 
God out of himself. 

In the second place, I would suggest that the commonly felt 
human objection to be nothing more than part of the natural 
order, nothing more than an extremely complicated and sen- 
sitive machine for reacting to our environment in the interests of 
our survival, has its true explanation in the religious, and 
supremely in the Christian, understanding of man. In the midst 
of our life and activity we are visited by grace, that is by powers 
of which we know we are not the authors. We hear and respond 
to our calling. 'I can fully discover myself,' writes Gabriel 
Marcel, ' only in so far as I respond to a call which comes to me 
from beyond where I now am.' 1 am not left to make life mean- 
ingful in the teeth of total meaninglessness, as Sartre would say. 
'I find myself as I discover an inner bond with others in shared 
ideas and shared feelings.' 

I have already mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was the 
son of a well-known German doctor and psychiatrist who 
taught in the University of Berlin. He entered the Lutheran 
Church as a pastor and after a period of study in America be- 
came a theological teacher in Berlin. He became deeply dis- 
turbed by the degree to which the churches, like the universities 
and almost every other institution in Germany, were being 
dragged along in passive acceptance of Nazi doctrines and 
practices. After being forbidden to lecture in Berlin by the Nazis, 
he withdrew to England where, as pastor of a German congre- 
gation, he carried on his protest. He was soon recalled to 
Germany to take charge of an emergency theological college 
for the training of young ministers for the emerging ' confessing ' 
church which was forming in resistance. Here he wrote books 
which were widely discussed in Germany and helped to draw a 
wide circle of Christians into steady resistance to the Nazis. 
Through his brother-in-law, Bonhoeffer had contacts with the 
German generals who later plotted an attack on Hitler's life. 
When war broke out in 1939, he was in the United States and 
was begged to stay. He decided to return and throw himself 
into the work of the confessing church. He was forbidden to 
lecture, preach, write or remain in Berlin. But the confessing 
church grew in strength. Meanwhile the same stirrings were 
taking place in the Roman Catholic Church. Helmuth von 
Moltke was adviser to the German supreme command on inter- 

142 



The Role of Religion in the Pursuit of Freedom 

national law. As such he used the opportunities which came his 
way to warn the Intended victims of the Nazis in occupied 
countries, and many Jews owed their survival to him. In 1942 he 
wrote to a friend in England, * It Is beginning to dawn on a not 
too numerous, but active, part of the population not that they 
have been misled, not that they are in for a hard time, not that 
they might lose the war, but that what is being done Is sinful . . . 
Perhaps you will remember that in discussions before the war I 
used to maintain that belief in God was not essential for coining 
to the results you arrive at. Today I know I was wrong, com- 
pletely wrong. You know that I have fought the Nazis from the 
first day, but the amount of risk and readiness for sacrifice which 
is asked from us now require more than right principles, especi- 
ally as we know that the success of our fight will probably mean 
a total collapse as a national unit ! ' Von Moltke was arrested, 
tried and shot, along with a group of his friends. The chief 
accusation against them w r as that they had 'discussed with 
Jesuit priests and Protestant ministers the possibility of Nazi 
collapse'. 'This gives us,' he wrote on the eve of Ms execution, 
6 the inestimable advantage of being killed for something which 
(a) we really have done and (b) is worth while.' 

Bonhoeflfer spent almost two years in prison in Berlin, from 
1943 to 1945, during which time he wrote the outline of a great 
work on Ethics. He was hanged on April 9th. All Ms life he spent 
in the pursuit of freedom, for himself and others. In his Ethics 
he speaks of It as the life of a man who Is committed to * the 
double bond with others and with God'. * Without this bond and 
this freedom there is no responsibility,' he wrote. Among his last 
papers, written as he was being carried from place to place with 
other prisoners in front of the advancing armies of the Allies, 
was a poem. 'Not a good poem', he wrote, 'but I'm no poet It 
expresses my ideas.' It is called 'Stations on the Road to 
Freedom'. It contains what any Christian would want to put 
Into the concept of freedom ; the note of overcoming death. 
Freedom demands first a body disciplined to obey your will, 
since the secret of freedom is learned only by way of control. 
Next, action : ' Bravely take hold of the real, not dallying with 
what might be. Not in the flight of ideas but only In action is 
freedom': but action is succeeded by suffering; the hands that 
were active are bound; helpless and alone you see the end 
of your deed and commit your freedom into the hand of God. 

143 



Kathleen Bliss 

Finally, fi O death, cast off the chains and lay low the thick walls 
of our mortal bodies and blinded souls that at last we may 
behold what here we failed to see. O Freedom, long have we 
sought thee in discipline and in action and in suffering. Dying 
we behold thee now and see thee in the face of God.' 



144 



Christian Values and Freedom 
JOSEPH PIEPER 



IT is an undeniable fact that * religion' or, to be more precise, 
the Churches and a number of individuals impelled by 
strong religious convictions, have made a stand against 
tyranny, whether in its National Socialist or its Bolshevik form, 
and have been active in the cause of freedom (and not merely of 
'religious* freedom). But I do not believe this indicates that the 
opposition between out and out secular rationalism and liber- 
alism on the one hand, and religion on the other, is based on a 
misunderstanding which this experience justifies us in dismissing 
once and for all. The general programme of our Congress 
includes a statement that may be summed up as follows : 'Dur- 
ing the eighteenth century religion was the arch-enemy of free- 
dom ; but it proved to be a stronghold of resistance to tyranny 
under the Third Reich.' That 'but' conveys astonishment. But I 
see no reason for astonishment. One could say, with a little 
exaggeration, that the reason for which religion was the enemy 
of freedom in the eighteenth century and remains so, even 
nowadays, from the point of view of liberal rationalism was 
the very same reason that led religion (i.e. the Church and 
certain strongly religious individuals) to resist government by 
tyranny. This is an indication of the complexity of the problems 
we have to tackle when we begin to inquire whether religion is a 
help or a hindrance to the achievement of freedom. 

It is true, of course, that both liberalism and Christianity have 
fought for freedom. But it must be remembered that they did so 
for very different reasons and with very different aims. And it is 
about these differences that I would like to say a few words. 

Mrs. Bliss was perfectly justified in quoting Count Helmuth 
von Moltke in her paper. But I cannot recall any passage in Ms 
letters which suggests that that noble man, who was actuated by 
consciously Christian motives, ever offered resistance in defence 

145 



Joseph Pieper 

of the idea of freedom', or that he fought and died in the speci- 
fic cause of 'freedom'. The same can be said of many others who 
rose up against tyranny because of their religious convictions. 
Moreover, the official utterances of the Church make few 
specific references to freedom. They say much more about truth, 
about justice and injustice, about human dignity and the dis- 
regard shown for it, about parents' right to bring up their 
children as they think fit and so forth. They do, of course, call 
for freedom as well. And of course Christians, like other people, 
regard freedom as a fundamental, indispensable and indisput- 
able right. No amount of talk will obliterate from the history of 
Christianity certain shameful and terrible episodes such as the 
Inquisition ; but it must be borne in mind that they were entirely 
contrary to the theories of Christianity itself. Whereas the crimes 
of the totalitarian regimes, whether National Socialist or Bol- 
shevik, were the logical consequence of their own principles. 
(St. Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the time of the Inquisition, 
went so far as to say that those who thought it wrong to believe 
in Christ were not allowed to believe in Mm ; and that it was 
better for a man to die in a state of excommunication than to 
disobey his own conscience.) But the 'concept of freedom' plays 
a very different part in Christian doctrine from the one it plays 
in the rationalistic and liberal view of the world. I do not think 
any liberal would say there could be such a thing as too much 
freedom ; he might not even admit that freedom could be mis- 
used. Whereas Christians are very decidedly of that opinion. 
There can never be too much justice, of course, and to speak 
of a misuse of justice would be nonsense. But freedom can very 
definitely be misused. 

There is another difference, and to my mind an even more 
important one, between Christian and liberal attitudes towards 
freedom. In order to understand it, we must remember that the 
6 idea' of freedom is one thing and the 'reality' of freedom is 
another thing. One characteristic of the Christian view of free- 
dom is, I believe, the conviction that in the history of mankind, 
there are certain things that can become realities only on con- 
dition that they are not specifically regarded and proclaimed as 
'ideas'. There are obviously certain things to which we can 
never attain if we expressly or even exclusively strive for them. 
They come to us adventitiously, when we are expressly aiming at 
something else. This is a theory that has other applications as 

146 



Christian Values and Freedom 

well ; psychoanalysts have discovered, for example, that there is 
no greater obstacle to mental health than the specific or exclu- 
sive determination to become healthy and remain so ; in other 
words, the expressly proclaimed 'Idea 5 of health Is an obstacle 
to the 'reality' of health. On the subject of freedom, the general 
programme of the Congress states that not all Ideas are con- 
ducive to freedom, and tells us to examine every Idea from the 
point of view of how far It safeguards or endangers freedom. 
One might venture to say that the Idea of freedom Is Itself one of 
the obstacles to the establishment of freedom. That is, of course, 
an exaggerated statement, which could easily be misunderstood 
and misinterpreted. But it is true, I think, to the extent that any- 
one who fights for the establishment of freedom must fight, 
first and foremost, for values which are determined by their 
Inherent content (truth, justice, human dignity and so forth). 
And this applies to the Christian or religious resistance to 
tyranny of which we have documentary knowledge. I think the 
part played by implicit aims in the fight for freedom even In the 
'October' riots in Poland and In the Hungarian uprising 
should not be underestimated. Paul Ignotus has told us here that 
the Hungarian resistance fighters were Inspired largely by ' tradi- 
tional 5 values. And in Hungary 'traditional 5 is probably synony- 
mous with 'Christian'. Herbert Liithy, too, said that Poland 
and Hungary were impelled not so much by nationalism as by 
the determination to establish a 'just form of society ' ; this again 
is obviously an inherent attitude. 

It Is admittedly very difficult to the modem mind the essen- 
tially difficult problem to discover the grounds for these 
inherent values and aims, express agreement with which con- 
stitutes, as I said just now, the true and perhaps the only 
preliminary condition for the achievement of freedom. For in- 
stance, authoritarian theory denies the rights of the individual, 
which are rooted in human nature ; and that denial serves as the 
motive for withholding freedom. I believe that in intellectual 
discussions there is no way of reaching a solution except by 
demolishing this argument in other words, by realizing (in the 
first place) that there really is such a thing as human nature (a 
point that is contested, for instance, in Sartre's existentialism ; he 
declares that // rfy a pas de nature humaine), and (in the second 
place) how and on what grounds this human nature confers on 
each individual human being each partner in the human rao 

147 



Joseph Pieper 

certain unalterable, absolutely binding rights. It seems to me 
that it would be hard for anyone who cannot respond to this, to 
justify the demand for freedom. 

Several speakers in our discussion have deplored the fact that 
people in * the West 9 , and especially university students, set little 
store by the idea of freedom. I wonder whether this alarming 
state of things may not be due to a failure to convince these 
young people of the significance and fundamental binding force 
of the inherent values on which the abstract concept of freedom 
can alone be based. 

To put it briefly, it seems to me that the contribution of 
6 religion* to the achievement of freedom has taken two principal 
forms. In the first place, it has given names to those inherent 
values whose materialization brings freedom 'adventitiously* 
In its train ; and in the second place it has supplied grounds and 
justification for those same values, whose binding power derives 
from a superhuman model. 



148 






KATHLEEN BLISS : . . . no return to the simplicities of ignor- 
ance . . . 

Insofar as religions have been explanations of natural pheno- 
mena or ways of influencing natural events, they are bound to 
yield place to scientific knowledge and practice. All religions 
will in time encounter this adulthood of man. Now there seems 
to me to be more than one way of assessing the situation that we 
are in at present. It is often regarded as a long fought out battle 
in which, either gradually, or by a series of rapid engagements, 
religion has been expelled from one field after another ; and this 
is seen as the heralding of the final defeat at the hands of an 
advancing science and technology. Either the problems of 
religion are solved in a different way, it is thought, or technology 
makes them unnecessary. On this view of things the religious 
person is the one who looks for gaps in human knowledge and 
fills them up with god-shaped explanations ; or he is one who 
claims for prayer, that perhaps it will sometimes work where 
psychiatric treatment has failed ; or perhaps in the last resort 
he is just someone who falls back on extra-sensory perception 
as a support for religious belief. I believe there is another way of 
evaluating this whole engagement leading to our present situa- 
tion, namely that what has been happening has been not only 
the liberation of the mind of man or the exploration of the 
natural world, but also the liberation of religion itself. For 
religion has, for centuries, been used to explain every individual 
phenomenon. It lias been also, in the form of codes and taboos, 
the social cement of many communities and it has always been in 
danger of being dragged down by popular ignorance into the 
world of superstition. All religions have had their prophets and 
the struggle of the prophets have always been with popular and 
debased forms of religion. 

The task of the prophet is to recall man to religion in its high- 
est form, an aspiration towards the love of the good and the 

149 



Criticism and Discussion 

pursuit of It by hard endeavour. Now here perhaps we have to 
raise the question of the role of the religious institutions, a great 
stumbling block. Religious institutions always can be and fre- 
quently are the rallying point of every kind of conservatism. But 
I would also point out that without the religious institution, the 
prophet is comparatively helpless, for it is through the institu- 
tion that he builds a following for Ms ideas and sets them into 
motion. The liberation of religion in the present situation seems 
to me to be the release we have obtained from the necessity of 
belonging to a society in which religion was stretched beyond its 
limits to everything in life. We now see more clearly that faith 
is a responsible act. This doesn't necessarily make it easier, 
perhaps the reverse, but it does make it clearly what it is. 

To be in any genuine sense a religious person in the modern 
world demands, it seems to me, both intelligence and will. 
There is no return to the past, to the simplicities of ignorance, 
but there is an open possibility of reinstating our beliefs as those 
things to which we articulately submit ourselves. 

One problem has greatly exercised freedom-loving parents : 
the upbringing of their children. It has been thought by many of 
them, that in order to respect their freedom, they must be 
brought up uncommitted in any ultimate belief. This has meant 
that, willy-nilly, parents have passed to their children the idea 
that commitment is somehow something to be avoided. We 
want above all things our children to be free ; but it seems to me 
that to give them a vision of commitment, which, when adult- 
hood is achieved, can be rebelled against, is a finer and, in the 
end, a more viable form of freedom in education, than a lack of 
commitment to anything but lack of commitment. 

RICHARD HENSMAN: . . . a counterpoise to the authority of the 
State . . . 

It often happens that when the convictions that we live by are 
attacked or criticized by others we tend to get violently in- 
volved. Such feelings are likely to be so violent as to break the 
bounds of scholarly discussion and the taboo on religion today 
which Dr. Bliss spoke about has a cause which we should note 
at the outset : religious people have, in the past, not only been 
conservative ; they have also very offensively interfered in the 
lives of others. They have been among the chief enemies of 

150 



Criticism Discussion 

personal liberty. I myself believe that in some cases, in certain 
historical situations, a good dose of secularism and anticleri- 
calism is a constructive and positive force in history and I believe 
this is true of my own country Ceylon at the present mo- 
ment. 

What, insofar as progress in freedom is concerned, are the 
present challenges and the present opportunities in the world as 
a whole? 

When we think of small groups of economically and politic- 
ally privileged people, then we can afford to see the virtues of 
moderation and rationality. But in the world as a whole, where 
life is a struggle and where resources are adequate only for a 
frugal and active life for all men, some men are tempted to live 
luxuriously by exploiting others. In fact in the greater part of the 
world the material pre-conditions of freedom don't exist. 

We cannot discuss this subject without thinking about South 
Africa or China or Eastern Africa, where life seems to move, 
where much more fundamental issues of freedom are being 
raised than in the more ordered, more stable societies that we 
tend to talk about. Our main concern is with what religion 
claims to do and with what it is demonstrably able to do. I think 
the first point to be made about religious faith and I refer 
specifically to Buddhism or Christianity is that it is offered as a 
key to the emancipation of the self. 

It is the essence of the higher religions that they define the 
state of men's life, of irreligious life, shall we say, as a state of 
ignorance about the fundamental facts of life and offer and 
recommend as a way of life, a way to realization of the self, and 
if we think of the personal life, of personal initiative, of personal 
responsibility as related to this release of the self, emancipation 
of the self, then here we have a clue, a pointer to what religion 
proposes to offer for the life of man in society under all condi- 
tions. My second point is that religion functions very often as 
culture of a group, as something that holds a group together. 
The authority which a religious group or religion offers, is some- 
thing of a counterpoise to the authority of the community, the 
authority of the State. 

At its best religion testifies to values and standards which are 
denied or ignored in society and in doing so it offers man a 
choice, an authority which he can place against what could 
be the very oppressive deadweight of the tradition of the 

151 



Criticism and Discussion 

community or the law of the State, the power of the State. On 
the other hand, of course, where you have religious hierarchies 
which claim allegiance over the minds of people, you have the 
situation which I referred to earlier: religion becomes an 
oppressive force. 

HELMUT GOLLWITZER: . . . This fortress of freedom . . . 

The universal claim to certain basic rights, which is included 
nowadays in the programmes of all governments, first arose 
out of the Christian doctrine of equality. Observation of nature, 
otherwise than as a branch of magic, originated with the 
Christian release of the world from its chains, and the debunking 
of magic. 

The problem of reducing the tension between faith and know- 
ledge has therefore a very different aspect within the Christian 
tradition from what it will now have for the Asian and African 
peoples with their own religions. One cannot foresee in what 
development of thought that will take place. 

At one time there was a general tendency to assume that 
scientific and technical instruction would break up the historical 
religions. Somebody once said : c By explaining to a Negro the 
working of a modern rifle, you do more to divorce him from his 
traditional heathen beliefs than through the preaching of all the 
missionaries put together. ' 

In fact, the contrary seems to be true. Self-awareness, among 
the Asian and African peoples, leads also to a strengthening of 
the old religions; they become adjusted, partly through the 
the incorporation of certain elements borrowed from Chris- 
tianity such as the idea of loving one's neighbour. Christianity 
is felt to be the real problem, the soil from which secularism, 
materialism, Communism and so forth have sprung; but these 
peoples also recognize that there is something essentially 'dif- 
ferent' about Christianity, and to some extent they turn in the 
opposite direction. In other words, I don't think Toynbee is 
right in saying that we are entering upon a period of smoothing 
out of the differences between the great world religions. 

Mr. Hensman said that the value of religion was that it 
helped us to realize our true selves, and that it maintained and 
affirmed certain values which are denied or neglected in the 
present social order. This would mean that in any case the 

152 



Criticism and Discussion 

Christian faith has the task of serving as a refuge for the truths 
that are forgotten or overlooked in each generation. But it 
seems important to me that we should realize that a de-human- 
izing influence can be exerted not only by want, hunger, slavery 
and the other characteristics of earlier ages which may be 
ultimately abolished in an affluent society. Affluence itself can be 
just as de-humanizing. The Christian contribution should there- 
fore consist of the ideas derived from Christianity the inalien- 
able quality of man, the inviolability of conscience, the 
precedence of the individual over the species, the eternal value of 
the human soul I say those ideas derive from Christianity, but 
someone may dispute this later on ; in any case they have a very 
definite and, in my opinion, incomparable foundation in the 
basic tenets of the Christian faith. When they are divorced from 
the Christian faith and go into circulation as abstract ideas, they 
gradually lose their strength. So they have to be perpetually 
revived, and that is the responsibility of which Christians should 
always be reminding one another, in a world in which they see 
that certain ideas and categories of thought derived from the 
Christian tradition are spreading all over the earth in such an 
astounding way. 

Anyone in the Communist world who is a Christian and the 
same thing is very possibly true of Moslems, Buddhists and so 
forth, but I can only speak for the Christians anyone in the 
Communist world who is a Christian is at once placed in a 
reserved area of freedom, in relation to the all-absorbing claims 
of the official ideology. He is bent upon widening the gaps in the 
ideological control system, upon recognition of the individual 
conscience ; he indicts the conscience of the government officials, 
he is bent upon promoting individual responsibility, upon mak- 
ing the system less dogmatic and more human ; his only hope, in 
earthly matters, is evolution, and he wishes to make an active 
contribution to it. Christians have learnt from their faith the 
conviction that man cannot be turned into an ant, even if the 
totalitarian systems try to produce that result; Christians in 
those countries no longer believe that; they themselves are a 
proof of the contrary, and they receive further surprising proofs 
of it every day. 

The importance of religion in the fight for freedom lies in the 
fact that it protects the innermost core of man from the influ- 
ence of every human power. During the Third Reich a friend of 

153 



Criticism and Discussion 

mine, a Bavarian parson, was visited by a peasant lad from his 
parish, who since he last saw Mm had joined the S.S. The lad 
explained that he was one of the guards of a concentration 
camp. The parson remarked that terrible things were said of 
such places, but the young man would not confide in him. And 
then suddenly he launched Into another topic, saying that the 
S.S. were demanding that he should leave the Church; and he 
wanted the parson's opinion about that 'You've hardly been 
Inside the church since you were confirmed.,' said the parson, 
'so why do you feel any hesitation about leaving it altogether?' 
To which the young man replied, 'Well, the way I look at it, 
once they've got us outside the Church, they can do whatever 
they like with us. 5 By which he presumably meant: 'This very 
loose relationship to religion, my official membership of a con- 
gregation., Is my last link with something higher than mankind, 
something that protects me from falling utterly into the power 
of men. ' So I feel that we should look with sympathy upon this 
reserve of freedom, this fortress of freedom, into which religious- 
minded people can withdraw even under a totalitarian system. 
Inner freedom has often been contrasted with outward freedom, 
as though it were a consolation that could make people Indiffer- 
ent to outward freedom. But In fact, though Inner freedom Is 
naturally a consolation for the loss of outward freedom, it Is also 
an Incitement to fight for the cause of outward freedom. 

JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN: . . . the unconquerable spirit of 
man . . . 

I have not been, In my life, professing any particular religion, 
but I have been concerned with both the question of freedom 
and the essence of religion. It is obvious to me, though I am not 
a student of religious history, that religions as they have been 
practised have in many cases acted as obstacles to freedom. 
I was bom into the Hindu religion and, traditionally, Hinduism 
believes In caste and even in untouchability. That certainly is 
denial of freedom, restriction of freedom. Any religion, I think, 
which has a set of dogmas does restrict freedom of the mind, 
freedom of thought. Any religion which Is based on organiza- 
tion, rigid organization, would necessarily restrict freedom. 
Any religion which would create a sort of hierarchy of religious 
beliefs would again limit freedom. At the same time, when I 

154 



Criticism and Discussion 

think of some of the highest concerns of Hinduism, which ate 
freedom of the individual from al attachment, freedom from 
desires, freedom from the cycle of birth and death, then 1 think 
of Hinduism as a great liberating force. The Islamic religion or 
Christian religion speaks of the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of men. That concept, if it is a religious concept, 
would again be a great force in the cause of freedom. 

If all human beings are brothers, then no brother can deny or 
should deny freedom to another and that freedom will include 
all kinds of freedoms. Again, the way of love that Christ 
preached or the way of compassion that the Buddha preached, 
seem to me to be at the root of every kind of human freedom, 
material or spiritual. Therefore I should say that it is not easy to 
deal with the subject unless we are clear as to the terms we are 
using. In our struggle for freedom, for instance, in the Indian 
struggle for freedom, religion played a great role because it 
teaches the indestructibility of the human soul and those who 
were encouraged to participate in the freedom struggle were to 
be fortified by the belief that whatever the British did to them, 
they were indestructible and in that faith they became better 
fighters for freedom. Having won freedom it is quite possible 
that, as is happening in India, religion is used to oppress people. 
I cannot admit a religion that can divide human beings. Religion 
should be a uniting force. But the religions that exist today do 
divide the human family and I think this age of science and 
technology does demand a religion which would embrace the 
human race ; the human beings lived far from one another, now 
they have been brought together into a small neighbourhood 
and any religion that acts as a barrier between them is, I think, 
an outdated institution. 

I am not sure, in fact I doubt it very much, whether science 
alone can provide an adequate philosophy of life. I do feel that, 
if one is to fight for human freedom in all its forms, whether it is 
freedom from hunger or freedom of thoughts, freedom of the 
spirit, we have to go beyond science. We have often talked, I 
have myself talked about the unconquerable spirit of man, I 
don't know if science gives an evidence of this unconquerable 
spirit of man, but I have said it and I believe in it desperately, 
because if I give up that belief then I reaEy become desperate 
about the future of the human race. I believe in this spirit of man 
and I do not think that this spirit would allow him to remain 

L 155 



Criticism and Discussion 

under oppression or would allow Mm to continue, as a human 
being. Now what is this spirit and how are we going to define it 
in secular terms, I do not know. This might bring us very near to 
religion, but even if we do not use the term I do not think that 
we can do without faith in this human spirit which seems to me 
beyond science and technology, beyond anthropology and 
sociology and psychology. It is this belief in the human spirit 
that really guarantees freedom, not only for today, but for 
always. Without this I do not think that it would be possible for 
us, rationally, to argue against the commissars and the planners 
and all those who are trying to give us the good things of our 
life. 



SIDNEY HOOK: ...the legacy of Kant andFeuerbach . . * 

I shall take my point of departure from a remark made by my 
good friend Narayan when he said that he does not think that 
we could rationally justify our struggle for freedom unless we 
believe in the human spirit. I think I believe in the human spirit 
but it doesn't commit me to a belief in the existence of the soul 
which is a very disputed matter, and depends upon considera- 
tions not pertinent to the struggle of freedom. If we want to 
have a rational approach to this question, there are certain 
fundamental and perhaps elementary questions that one must 
ask oneself. Almost all of the speakers admitted that historically 
religion has often been opposed to freedom and quite specific 
freedoms, not general freedom in the way in which Professor 
Pieper discussed it, but freedom of inquiry, freedom of artistic 
expression, the kinds of freedoms which the Congress for 
Cultural Freedom believes in and wants to see expanded in the 
world. Now, if it is admitted that historically religion has often 
been opposed to freedom and if we say with Mr. Narayan that 
true religion ought to do this or that, isn't it obvious that the 
fundamental criterion becomes an ethical one and that you 
judge religion as acceptable or not acceptable, as good or bad, 
in terms of a criterion which cannot be derived from any 
religion since, by your own admission, the very same religion 
that you appeal to has in the past been used as historical justi- 
fication for the caste system and discrimination. Now this, I 
think, is of tremendous importance because it raises the whole 
question of the relevance of religion to the struggle for freedom. 

156 



Criticism and Discussion 

We know that Christianity never condemned slavery in prin- 
ciple, never condemned feudalism and that the first liberation 
movements were derived from the rationalist strain and 
stoicism. But I want to leave the historical evidence ; sometimes 
religious movements have played a progressive role, sometimes 
they have not. It seems odd that in Berlin and in Germany, the 
legacy of Kant and the discoveries of Feuerbach are ignored. I 
come to the main analytical point : I ask the question of all of the 
speakers, who have shared the same generic point of view : show 
me specifically how you derive any concrete freedom from any 
theological or religious proposition? Of course if you are going 
to define religion in terms of passion or feeling, then everybody 
is religious unless he is half dead. But if you say that freedom 
depends upon the belief in the brotherhood of men and in the 
fatherhood of God, how do you get from the fatherhood of God 
to any particular, concrete freedom in this world? Because what 
is true for freedom, I should argue, is true for truth. The concept 
of truth cannot be derived from religion, because the validity of 
religion depends upon the acceptance of the value of truth. 
After all it was Paul who said : 6 All men are equal in the sight 
of the Lord, whether bound or free/ which indicates quite 
definitely for Paul and many who followed Mm that from the 
proposition that all men are equal in the sight of the Lord, it 
does not follow that they should be equal in the sight of the law 
or equal in some social respect. Not only India but the whole 
tradition of the West, up to modern times, indicated that one 
could be a good Christian believing in inequality, in other words 
that the belief in the fatherhood of God is compatible with any 
kind of a social system. And if someone tells me that this was a 
fallacy on the part of Christians in the past, I should answer that 
it is a little doubtful whether we can, for example, raise ques- 
tions about the validity of the Christianity of Thomas Aquinas, 
who defends the death sentence, something which our Congress 
is opposed to. Consequently, the problem is to show the logical 
connection which is presumed to exist between religion and the 
struggle for freedom. I think that this connection must be estab- 
lished even if it were psychologically true that under some cir- 
cumstances a belief in religion might inspire a belief in or a 
movement towards freedom. I submit that if we try to organize 
a struggle for freedom on the basis of religion, we divide our 
forces; sooner or later the question arises what is the true 

157 



Criticism and Discussion 

religion? Sooner or later we have to ask ourselves whether we 
can reconcile the different religions of the world. 

INGEMAR HEDENIUS: . . . the believer and the free thinker . . 

The assumption that a logical relationship exists between 
religious beliefs and the belief in duty can only mean that I am 
being illogical if I say 'This is my duty, I am absolutely certain 
of that, but I doubt the existence of God, life after death, and so 
forth'. Whereas it seems to me that there is nothing at all illog- 
ical about asserting the one point about duty and denying, 
or expressing doubt about, the other. In my opinion, however, 
the question of logic is not interesting. There are other and more 
interesting questions that arise in this connection, such as 
psychological questions. For instance, does the believer in 
reMgion consider it necessary to be an ethical idealist I mean, 
not only to talk like one, but to live like one as well? And it is 
perfectly clear that this psychological connection does not 
exist. So faith, in this sense, cannot be a necessary condition for 
ethical idealism as is obvious from the fact that many free 
thinkers have proved themselves to be ethical idealists. Religious 
faith may of course be part of the basis for ethical idealism. 
And that, I think, is true, but it is only a platitude. There must 
be other contributory circumstances in addition to religious 
belief, such as courage, a certain zeal, the capacity not to be 
always thinking solely of one's own life, etc. In those circum- 
stances religious belief may act as a powerful stimulus for 
ethical idealism. But the same can be said of agnostics and free 
thinkers, even of atheists. It obviously takes something more 
than agnosticism and atheism and so forth to make an ethical 
idealist. But the free thinker's conviction that we cannot hope 
for God's help in this life, or look forward to a future life, can 
also act as a powerful stimulus to ethical idealism. For it then 
becomes all the more necessary for us to make efforts on our own 
behalf, and that is a stimulus, too. In this sense, the believer and 
the free thinker are on the same footing. Neither has a mono- 
poly of ethical idealism, both have equal rights in the matter. 

KARL LOEWITH: . . . only freedom can make us true , . . 

Dr. Bliss's paper did not convince me personally that the 
Christian belief, the injunction to love one's neighbour in the 

158 



Criticism and Discussion 

Christian sense, has any essential connection with the "Pursuit of 
Freedom \ as it Is called in the title. At any rate, not In the sense 
In which the Word "freedom' is used in the American Declara- 
tion of Independence and In the French Declaration of Human 
Rights. I see no connection between the Christian claim that the 
cross takes upon it the suffering of the poor and humble, and 
what Is known as secular materialism, the aim of which is to 
improve the lot of mankind through worldly means, redeem 
mankind through its own strength, and which consequently 
relies on the progress of science and technology. Christian 
freedom this was implicit In what Mr. Gollwitzer said, too 
is in essence a freedom from the world and all things worldly, 
and It presumably makes no fundamental difference to the 
believer in Christianity whether he is living in a totalitarian 
State or in a liberal democracy. And the statement that all men 
are equal. In the Christian sense, means only that they are equal 
in the sight of God not before the law and among men, as 
men. But if we set aside this religious aspect, everything becomes 
different ; what Christianity designates as c sin' Is seen as evil that 
will be got rid of by progress ; the statement in the New Testa- 
ment that only truth can make us free is reversed and becomes 
the statement that only freedom can make us true. 'Freedom 
from want, Ignorance, disease, fear' is not a basic tenet of 
Christianity. I do not mean to suggest by all this that Christian 
freedom from worldly things cannot have constructive results, 
even in the worldly dealings of a Christian. It does, of course, 
have such results, as Mr. Gollwitzer's own observations indi- 
cate ; but the preliminary condition for this Christian capacity 
to resist the so-called * historical moment' is that, because of his 
faith, the Christian can stand aloof from other matters, in a way 
that is usually not possible for the non-believer. 

Either we believe in science, in which case science must be 
allowed to have its say about human nature, or we turn to the 
New Testament for the answer to the question 'What is man 5 
and the answer we shall find there will not be the product of 
scientific reflection. I think it is essential for us to give up trying 
to find a more precise definition of what freedom is, or of the 
meaning attributed to It here; otherwise we shall be led into 
completely arbitrary inferences. 



159 



Criticism and Discussion 

ENZO BOERI : . . . ignoramus et ignorabimus . . . 

The Christian Church has opposed scientific inquiry from 
the very beginning, from the time of Galileo. It opposed all 
discoveries of geology and in the last century, all the discoveries 
of evolution. In a certain way, many of our discoveries which 
have led to the present civilization are more in the line of the pre- 
Christian than in the line of Christian tradition. 

If I look from a more parochial point of view, in my country 
Italy religion is a very evident limitation to freedom. For 
instance, in our country former priests cannot teach in the 
schools, divorce cannot be legally obtained. If we look at the 
present religions in the world, be it the Christian, the Asian 
religions, the Jewish, any of them, they are all bound to pri- 
vileges, to conservative positions, they have proved false in 
many occasions where they had to oppose with scientific 
thought. Nevertheless, we can well admit that there is an intrin- 
sic religiousness of man and that some of the psychological 
problems of the present civilization are precisely due to the 
inadequateness of any religion in contrast with the intrinsic 
religiousness of man. Now what can be the way out of the 
present situation is very difficult to say. I should say that the 
most important thing is of course ethical code and, as for 
the problem of God, one hundred years ago a physiologist in 
this town said 'ignoramus et ignorabimus 5 and probably it is 
not the time to say 'ignoramus et non ignorabimus'. 

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: . . .freedom as an attribute of human 
life . . . 

I have only something quite brief to say but it is addressed to 
Mr. Hook's plea that the Congress does not allow differences of 
attitude towards religion to interfere with its fundamental agree- 
ment on freedom. I cannot hear Professor Pieper or Mrs. Bliss 
speak without the deepest appreciation and admiration and I 
find myself close to what Mr. Narayan said. I think that it is 
true that we will never derive the great commitments of human 
life in an unambiguous way from religious doctrines. In a 
certain sense, they were not meant for that and I share Mr. 
Hook's despair when he attempts to do this. I do think, though, 
that there is an intermediate ground where we do have work to 

160 



Criticism and Discussion 

do and that is In enlarging our agreement as to what we mean by 
freedom and what we hope for from it. When we mean freedom 
from tyranny, I think we are all in a simple, straight agreement 
and we are not very far from the things that we wish to see an 
end to. But when we talk of freedom as an attribute of human 
life, as something which we could hope would still be discussed 
a hundred years from now, we will, I think, share Professor 
Pieper's view that not all the good things in human life result 
from being aimed at; many are by-products and a discussion of 
the ways in which we would like to see the human spirit grow, 
is to my mind very much in order for the Congress for Cultural 
Freedom. To this those who are religious will bring a great deal 
and those who are agnostic will bring something too. 

ALEX WEISSBERG : . . . a totalitarian system of belief . . . 

Professor Pieper quite rightly differentiates between brutality 
resulting from actual theories, and brutality resulting from the 
misapplication of those theories. But in practice I think he is 
wrong in two respects the case of the Christian Church and the 
case of Bolshevism. We can assume that Nazi totalitarianism 
acted in conformity with its theories. Everything that developed 
in course of time was latent in the ideas concerning race, the 
idea of the Herrenvolk, the maxim that 'whatever serves my 
nation is good and true'. But with Bolshevism it was different 
The cradle of Communism was watched over by a deeply 
humanitarian idea, and the assault on freedom was committed 
only gradually and much against the will and against the feelings 
of the earliest Bolsheviks. Lenin believed that after three months 
of dictatorship people would realize that the Communists were 
right, and then there would be boundless, anarchical freedom. 
On the other hand, Pieper rather overshot the mark when he 
tried to clear Christianity from the obloquy of the Inquisition. 
We need not blame the Church for the excesses of the Borgias, 
for those were unchristian ; but the attempt to create a totali- 
tarian system of belief and admit of no division in it, right up 
to the Reformation, is entirely compatible with the basic tenets 
of the Christian Church. And in both cases the reason was the 
same : anyone who uses force in order to put over ideas that the 
majority of people don't want, or no longer want, must neces- 
sarily end by violating freedom. If Lenin's views had ever been 

161 



Criticism and Discussion 

in harmony with the wishes of the great mass of the Russian 
people, those excesses would never have occurred. If, like the 
Church in the old days, a leader finds he can preserve the sys- 
tem not only the system of power, but the way of looking at 
things only by an assault on other people, then he commits the 
assault. When I came back from Russia and described how 
millions of people were being thrown into prison as profiteers 
and counter-revolutionaries, and that there was no kind of 
counter-revolutionary organization, that nothing of all that 
existed, people in England wouldn't believe me at first. So I said 
to them : Now look, in the course of three centuries in Germany, 
about 900,000 witches and wizards were burnt at the stake, but 
as we know nowadays there were no witches just as there are 
no Trotskyites in Russia today. Later an English friend said to 
me, 'You're wrong, there were witches.' When I asked what he 
meant, he said : 'Not objectively, of course ; because when those 
women believed they could make the milk go sour or set the 
crops on fire, they couldn't really do it. But they thought they 
could, and in that sense they formed an organization that people 
could join. So people who had turned to God and got nothing 
out of it might perhaps try the devil ; and that meant just as 
dangerous competition for the Christian Church as heresy did, 
and that is why the full force of the totalitarian machinery of the 
Inquisition was directed against those alleged witches.' So we 
see that when a totalitarian power wants to maintain a system 
of thought or a system of power that runs counter to the true 
interests, or even merely to the opinions of the majority, it is 
compelled to use brute force. 

RONALD SEGAL: . . . entrenched, organized religion . . . 

I think that the speaker I heard defending the encouragement to 
freedom given by Christianity, on the other side of the Iron 
Curtain, would do well to consider what entrenched, organized 
religion is doing in the Union of South Africa where the Dutch 
Reformed Church, the nearest we have to an established church, 
is in fact peddling all the doctrines, all the dogmas of the repres- 
sion. It is with considerable dismay that I have to report that 
one of the manifestations of political resistance in the Union 
today is now the burning of churches within African areas, and 
the burning not of Dutch reformed churches, but the burning of 

162 



Criticism and Discussion 

Anglican churches and the burning of Catholic churches. Now, 
Mr. Chairman, this is a turning from religion that is not a re- 
gression towards tribalism which is the policy of the government 
itself, it is a running away from organized religion as the 
adverse side and the running away not from one sect but from 
all sects. It is perfectly true that on occasions other Christian 
sects in South Africa have opposed the peculiarly bratai stand 
taken by the Dutch Reformed Church, but the church of the 
province, which is the Anglican church in the Union, pays 
different stipends to white and to black, and within all the 
organized churches with European, American, international 
counterparts the senior hierarchy is entirely white. I have heard 
a great deal about the doctrine of love, the doctrine of com- 
passion. In a society where it has been shown conclusively that 
compassion does not influence events, in a society where it 
appears increasingly every day that violence can only be met by 
some form of counter-violence, what stand can organized relig- 
ion take? In a situation like in South Africa there is no religion 
at the moment in existence, no organized religion that can 
supply any of the answers to the very real problems that exist 
within a race-crazy society. 

HUGH SETON- WATSON: . . . a certain intolerance of the anti- 
clerical . . . 

In Ms Origins of Totalitarian Democracy Professor Talmon 
stressed the difference between intolerance and oppression in the 
name of something which is related to another life and intoler- 
ance in relation to the present world ; the point that Talmon 
made was that when belief in another life ceased to operate, this 
led to an increase of intolerance, because once you believe that 
perfection can be achieved in this world, you have a duty to 
carry out this perfecting by any means available because the 
reckoning was not left to the next world but was here on this 
earth. And this led to a kind of intensification of oppression and 
intolerance. Now, I think there is something here, there is a 
connection between the disappearance of religion and totali- 
tarianism. I do not by that mean that secularists or unbelievers as 
such are intolerant, but merely that the tendency towards intol- 
erance and oppression and coercion of the mind and of the 
body which is present to some extent in all societies, has had a 

163 



Criticism and Discussion 

certain intensification as a result of the disintegration of religious 
belief, and the only reason why I want to mention this is to 
suggest that the argument isn't surely between those who say 
that you must be a believer in order to be in favour of freedom, 
or that you must be an unbeliever to be in favour of freedom. 
Surely we can stop this sort of sterile discussion which seems to 
me at times to have a kind of undertone of what I can only call 
old-fashioned nineteenth-century anti-clericalism. Of course 
there are parts of the world, we all know, in which religious in- 
tolerance is still very much in force ; certainly in Spain, perhaps 
even in Italy, the power of the Church is still used to coerce 
men's minds. But it seems to me that tyranny is tyranny whether 
it is secularist or religious and we are against tyranny of either 
kind. I think it is still a widespread view and I seem to get 
echoes of it at times that there is something inherently tyran- 
nical about religious belief. Now this seems to me to be utterly 
wrong. There is a certain intolerance of the anti-clerical towards 
religious belief as such which dates from the time in the eigh- 
teenth century when oppression and coercion of men's minds 
and bodies was in fact chiefly carried out by the Church and the 
Inquisition. In fact, religious belief does not necessarily lead to 
freedom but it does not necessarily lead to tyranny either. 



164 



Some Philosophical Remarks 
Concerning the Contemporary World 

JEANNE HERSCH 



THE text proposed to us by Mr. Polanyl referred to the 
'hollow man*. It is that 'hollow man* I would like to talk 
about. For in my opinion this 'hollowness* constitutes a 
very great danger to the defence of the Western world and to 
what we mean here by 'freedom*. In his paper, Mr. Polanyi 
drew attention to a sequence of historical transformation which 
is important, but which is perhaps not the only one. I shall try to 
add certain features to those he pointed out to us. 

It seems to me that at the heart of the question there is the 
radical disproportion, which colours our whole life nowadays, 
between the existence that the present day allows us, as indi- 
vidual human beings, and the tremendous power that is con- 
ferred upon us anonymously. I would like to begin by pointing 
out and commenting upon this disproportion. 

It is a truism to say that science and technology have increased 
a hundredfold the power of the human being. Man, as such, at 
present wields a power beyond comparison greater than that 
which he possessed only forty years ago. That power entails a 
multiplication of our presence in the world, and a multiplication 
of the world's presence with us through all the forms of infor- 
mation available to us, and which thrust themselves upon us 
whether we want it or not. For we are not free to take them or 
leave them alone. Nowadays, when there is a famine anywhere 
in the world, we hear about it, and we know approximately how 
many victims it has caused; we can no longer remain ignorant 
of it. The world is with us, as it were, in its entirety. And the fact 
of knowing about things means that we automatically feel some 
degree of responsibility for them. It seems to us that with the 

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Jeanne Hersch 

power we possess as human beings, we could prevent certain 
of the disasters that occur In the world, If we wanted to or If we 
knew how to set about It. This increased power thus entaUs an 
immense, perhaps exaggerated. Increase in our sense of respon- 
sibility. 

But at the same time our belief In progress has deserted us. 
After experiencing Hitler, after the crimes of that recent period, 
we believe we can attain to still greater power, we do not regard 
this as an unmixed blessing, as a definite sign that history is 
advancing along the right lines. 

Moreover, at the very moment when Ms power and Ms 
presence were being thus multiplied., the human being has seen 
Ms specifically human qualities challenged as they had perhaps 
never been before. What Kant calls die Menschheit im Menschen, 
the humanity of man the factors that make a human being 
human has been called in question, to an Increasing extent and 
In an ever more fundamental manner, by the biological sciences, 
and even more by the social sciences. These have striven, by a 
variety of methods and means, to reduce to a minimum the 
element in man wMch cannot be explained by casual relations, 
definable In terms of biological or social conditions. They have 
tried, as it were, to pare away man's irreducible core, in the 
apparent hope that finally there would be nothing left of Mm. 
Man would then be solely the product of Ms biological or social 
antecedents, and the causal chains linking all the facts of the 
universe would no longer be broken up by the effects of free will. 

Science regards freedom as sometMng negative, a point of 
non-explanation, a Matus in the explanation. And the present 
moment Is a kind of anomaly in the time of which science makes 
use a time in wMch nobody is In any specific position, and 
which Is assumed to be continuous. Science has done its utmost 
to get rid of the awkward exceptions constituted by freedom and 
by the present moment, wMch refuse to fit into the continuity 
that would make everything explicable. And the strange thing is 
that the social sciences, in taking tMs course, believed they were 
imitating the natural sciences, learning from them and In some 
way widening their frontiers : whereas it seems to me that In 
reality (I venture on tMs ground with great trepidation, especi- 
ally considering some of those who are at present here) It 
seems to me that on the contrary, by taking this line the social 
sciences have drawn further and further away from what 

166 



Philosophical Remarks Concerning the Contemporary World 

characterizes the natural sciences. For tie latter have striven 
constantly for greater clarity in their methods ; their standards 
of proof have been raised higher and higher and they have 
grown increasingly cautious in the interpretation of their results, 
their discoveries. Whereas the social sciences have been remark- 
able chiefly for the wide scope of the laws they laid down ; the 
nice thing about these ail-embracing laws being that they defied 
proof. In the natural sciences, the wider the application of a 
Iaw 5 the more it requires to be proved ; but in the field of social 
science, the wider the application of a law, the less the possibility 
of proving it. Generalization is here a definite convenience and 
one which the social sciences hardly ever seem to have resisted. 

There has also been a trend which I might call existential. 
Perhaps driven to bay by the sciences which told him what he 
was and at the same time whittled away his essence as a free 
subject, man has, as it were, withdrawn from his explicable 
characteristics, those whose origin could be traced, and has 
concentrated more and more on the search for Ms irreducible 
self, the self belonging to him and to nobody else. 

For instance, the nature of the individual was at one time 
determined by his birth. The term 'blue blood 5 , as applied to the 
aristocrat, was not simply a metaphor ; it meant that the very 
nature of the aristocrat differed from that of other people ; and 
when a man was said to be an aristocrat the verb 'to be' had a 
very positive meaning. It meant that the property of being an 
aristocrat could not be removed from that man, that the fact of 
being one constituted Ms essential self, was an inseparable part 
of Mm. 

Similarly^ a man's function was an inseparable part of Ms 
nature; so that he had various attributes wMch clung to Ms 
nature, adhered to it, made part of it and combined to form it. 
King Lear, once he ceased to be a king, ceased to exist ; whereas 
nowadays we have a whole crowd of dethroned kings who still 
exist. Even the function of royalty seems to us to survive without 
a peg to hang on ; and the same applies to almost all functions, 
except perhaps that of the priest and within the army itself,, 
at any rate that of the military officer. 

It is the same tMng with social class. In spite of what we are 
told to the contrary, the individual feels that his inner essence is 
sometMng that transcends Ms class, and he tries to assert himself 
above and beyond Ms class, and finally comes to ignore it. It is 

167 



Jeanne Hersch 

the same, again, with family status. A father, for instance, is a 
man who happens to have a son. He is not essentially a father,, 
someone who deserves respect, whatever he does, merely owing 
to his being a father. Tradition, even, is regarded as capable of 
effecting changes in the self, but not as being a substantial 
element of it. Self is something more than character, too 
character seems to be only a contingent aspect of it. 

This movement of withdrawal, by which the human being 
tries to grasp, by elimination, what is entirely essential and 
unique in Mm, his real self, has the ultimate effect of reducing 
that real self to a kind of abstract point, to the bare discontin- 
uity of the passing moment, to the abstract inclusion of freedom 
in the causal chains I mentioned just now. We might quote here, 
with a different connotation, what Kipling says about the crab : 
*"I am I" says the crab, "myself and nothing else 9 " (not the 
exact words, of course they're in one of the 6 Just-So Stories') 
and recall Sartre's words, 'I am nothing.' Nothing that is to 
say, a break in the opaqueness of being. 

Needless to say, this withdrawal of the * self* automatically 
does away with the firm foundation on which society could build 
in former times, and which derived from the substantial, incor- 
porated nature of the symbols on which human relationships 
were based. Those symbols were part and parcel of the person 
and its social relations, they were very little affected by the 
virtues, sentiments or necessarily shifting loyalties of indi- 
viduals. They were supplied, as it were, both subjectively and 
objectively, at the same time as the social connections. 

Now that this firm foundation has disappeared, we are con- 
fronted by a new situation. Either we must accept instability 
and capricious change, or we must resist, taking refuge in an 
impassioned moralism to which Mr. Polanyi referred the other 
day in a different context. From now on, in fact, the only prop 
for stability is the actual existence of the individual who takes a 
particular set of social connections as part of his life. The con- 
nections no longer hold by themselves, they depend on certain 
individuals. 

Take the marriage bond, for example : so long as it is a sacra- 
ment, it is unaffected by anything that those who are connected 
by it may subsequently feel, think, experience or even wish; 
once it becomes personal it depends on the continuity of feeling 
of those individuals and on their behaviour. Personal freedom, 

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Philosophical Remarks Concerning the Contemporary World 

when It withdraws out of any and every context In order to 
'purify' itself and become "Inward 9 to the maximum degree, 
transforms aU connections into something inward and personal. 
After that, any connection between persons Is conditioned by 
the inner being of those persons. 

It thus acquires a different and perhaps much greater value. 
It is not my Intention here to weigh one against the other. But it 
is clear that once a connection withdraws inward, it Immediately 
and inevitably becomes very fragile. The standard of morality 
based on firmly established precepts disappears, to be replaced 
(as can be very clearly seen, for instance, in recent French litera- 
ture) by a single, very ill-defined value, which not only varies 
from one person to another, but may even fluctuate during the 
lifetime of a particular person : a certain demand for sincerity 
and authenticity. 

The question then arises as to whether man can stand up to 
this kind of freedom, whether he can carry a burden so heavy. 
And is It to be hoped that society can be held together with that 
kind of freedom as Its sole support? I think It should at any rate 
be realized that such freedom is something extremely difficult 
to take on. You remember the passage in Dostoievsky where the 
Grand Inquisitor declares that freedom is the most terrible gift 
ever bestowed on man; and it seems to me that this partly 
accounts for the lure of totalitarianism. 

Please do not misunderstand me : I am not trying to defend 
one or the other way of being, or to censure either of them. But 
it seems to me that in the last forty years (though it would be 
easy to point to some far more remote periods) men have tried 
to take upon themselves a freedom, the risks and Implications of 
which they failed to perceive beforehand. And then, as always 
happens, we were faced with the consequences, by life and by 
the facts. 

I will turn now to another point. Now that, thanks to scienti- 
fic and technical progress, man is no longer afraid of nature 
having tamed the phenomena of nature he has come to be 
afraid of another redoubtable nature that has risen up around 
him of Ms fellow-man, of other men, of society, of history. 
For present-day man it is society and history that constitute the 
jungle, the unforeseeable, menacing, perilous territory. I think 
there has been a displacement of fear, with very profound conse- 
quences. 

169 



Jeanne Hersch 

it is of course true that a network of security, lost at the 
beginning of the industrial era, has been reconstructed on the 
social level, chiefly owing to what is aptly known as 6 social 
security'. But in my opinion the social security thus gained or 
regained, by strengthening people's desire to keep their place in 
the style of life and the environment where they can be sure of 
having it, has made them even more subject to the greater, more 
radical, lurking fear that threatens their whole security. 

Man's relationship to history has become strangely equivocal 
nowadays. It is a master-slave relationship which works both 
ways and whose terms are interchangeable : history is the area of 
power, where a man's capacities and intentions find scope and 
Ms plans come to fruition ; but conversely, history is the modern 
form of the doom that weighs down on him. Man enjoys history, 
but at the same time he would rather play no part in it, he wants 
to escape from it, he wants it to leave him in peace, to pass him 
by. He feels it to be subject to his plans, in other words malle- 
able, yet at the same time all-powerful, fateful. 

The same ambiguity is to be found in his relationship with the 
technological universe that now surrounds him, thanks to the 
advance of science. Man makes use of it every day, at every 
moment lie is continually using it, but without understanding 
what he is using. He is in the midst of a world that is submissive, 
but uncomprehended. So there revives, in the man of today, a 
receptivity towards superstitions, a tendency to be influenced by 
eschatological prospects and by escapist tendencies, and a vul- 
nerability to immeasurable fears, which are in utter contrast to 
the feeling of power that is awakening in him. Everything seems 
possible, because hardly anything can be really understood. 
And the astonishing thing is that for us, who live in this great 
era of science, the part of the world that is really clear the part 
we can all understand is, proportionately speaking, extremely 
restricted. 

Having become aware of history, willingly or unwillingly, 
consciously or unconsciously, man has to try to find a meaning 
for it. Attempts to do this are constantly being made on all 
sides. In present circumstances a philosophy of history thus 
seems to have become inevitable. On the other hand men, with 
the exception of great scientists, are usually devoured by impa- 
tience. They want to find the key at once, to know the last secret. 
Man finds it intolerable not to be told. He does not realize that 

170 



Philosophical Remarks Concerning the Contemporary World 

the refusal to tell Mm the last secret makes part of the infinitely 
complex, fragile and precious balance which is among the com- 
ponents of human freedom. He tMnks lie might know how it 
ends and be free all the same or be even freer, because then he 
would know what to do. This determination, this need, to dis- 
cover the ultimate secret seems to me to be yet another factor 
that favours totalitarian propaganda in our midst. 

But though the sense of history has become so keen among all 
our contemporaries (it is by no means the sole prerogative of the 
Marxists) it does not necessarily lead to political activity. Here 
we must realize something which is rather complicated but 
which seems to me to be important. To speak of history and to 
live 'historically' are two very different, in fact almost opposite, 
things. In talking about history one takes history as a kind of 
object, one holds it still in front of one. It is quite characteristic 
to find that, for instance, a philosophy of history such as Marx- 
ism gives us the term for it, thus transforming it into a thing, into 
a form of history which lies outside history. 

So what all of us today need to do is to find our proper place 
between the meaning of history, our capacity for being present 
within it, the sense of our powers and our helplessness ; all of 
which is very difficult to practise and take upon ourselves, for it 
is no mere theoretical result we have to achieve, nor is it a matter 
of tracing boundaries for neighbouring provinces. I think the 
question nowadays is not one of liking or disliking our time and 
i^ characteristics, but of really re-establishing contact with our 
time as it really is, with the possibilities it offers and the hope it 
allows which is a different hope from that of other periods. 
This means that instead of asking ourselves whether the 
changes that have occurred are good or bad, we have to accept 
them and ask ourselves what we can make out of them. Mass 
media, mass culture and so forth are no longer things it rests 
with us to maintain or get rid of. What does rest with us, is the 
value we are to extract from them for the benefit of humanity. 
But while criticism is easy, invention is difficult. And invention is 
what is needed. Since these new media are there, we have to 
invent new methods. 

I think it would be amusing to take an example that lies close 
at hand and say a few words about the methods of discussion in 
a Congress such as ours. A Congress like this, discussions like 
these, are also something new. We have assembled here from all 

M 171 



Jeanne Hersch 

the corners of the world because facilities for travel have become 
amazing, because we have microphones and simultaneous inter- 
pretation, and because all this enables us to talk together. Now 
it seems to me that such a meeting requires the invention of some 
method of discussion which has not yet been introduced. If I 
may make one or two suggestions, it seems to me that the first 
condition is that all the participants, irrespective of their rank, 
their qualifications, their past achievements, shall subordinate 
themselves entirely, unreservedly and without the least vanity to 
the interests of the progress of the discussion. That means recog- 
nizing our Chairman as a kind of conductor of an orchestra, 
whose baton we obey because it is he who has to ensure that the 
discussion proceeds smoothly. Secondly, the list of speakers 
should not be arranged according to the order in which they 
have applied to speak, because then one speaker can never reply 
to another, since each is always answering something said long 
before. On the contrary, I think, specific themes should be put 
up for discussion, and anything extraneous to the central theme 
should be mercilessly quashed. In saying all this I am not criti- 
cizing this particular Congress; all congresses are run in the 
same way nowadays. But I think it is a waste of our opportuni- 
ties for meeting and being present, by confining ourselves to a 
long sequence of interventions, with no real debate, such as 
could have been just as well circulated by the good old-fashioned 
printing-press. 

Another example: adult education. Here again, we must 
invent methods of continuing the education of adults, whoever 
they may be, whatever may be their occupation, throughout 
their lives. Science is advancing so rapidly, the world is changing 
so quickly, that it is nothing to have gone to school thirty or 
fifty years ago. So it is absolutely indispensable to keep on going 
to school throughout one's life. But that means inventing new 
methods, specially devised methods, for each different category 
of adults, so as to be able to start from what each of them does 
and knows already. 

Only education of this kind can and must provide the first 
remedy for the absolutely crucial vice of the mass media, which 
is that they abolish all spontaneous activity and replace it by 
inert absorption. This, I think, is a fundamental problem. One 
of the participants in this Congress said the other day that he 
had learnt some most interesting things about the French 

172 



Philosophical Remarks Concerning the Contemporary World 

abstract painter Manessler from a television programme. That 
is excellent, and there are undoubtedly some good programmes 
on television. But the question is whether, at the time of learning 
about Manessier ? it was about Manessier that one wanted to 
learn. The question is, where the personal interests of the 
person watching television lie, and whether those interests 
should be stimulated or, on the contrary, weakened or even 
destroyed and replaced by a colourless apathy, a void to be 
filled. It is essential that the impetus should continue to come 
from people, not from the machines; so it is imperative to 
intensify interest, and a selective faculty arising from that 
interest. And this, too, requires new educational techniques. 

My reason for running so quickly through these examples is 
not that I consider them unimportant, but for lack of time, and 
because I cannot resist making a few more suggestions, though 
they are perhaps already too numerous and disjointed. Here is 
another : I think we should prefer the workshop to the salon, 
creativeness to finished perfection. Our generation has devel- 
oped a worship of perfection, especially In art, which is on the 
way to killing culture. It is a good thing for certain programmes 
to be flawless, but there must be room left for practice, for 
growth, for spontaneity as weE. When one eats fresh fruit one 
always finds some bad ones in the lot. When you eat tinned 
fruit you can be certain they will all be magnificent. But the 
difference is the difference between what is fresh and what is 
canned. And it is the same thing with culture. One must run the 
risk of failure, in order to produce something that is alive. 
What I mean by the salon is the place where you assemble 
everything you consider perfect; what I mean by the workshop 
is the place where one tries to make something, which may end 
either in failure or success. We have to take the risk. 

I would like to seize the chance, now that I have the floor, to 
make a few more comments on the papers we have heard in the 
last few days. 

As to political and economic matters, there is only one thing I 
want to say that we have to devise socialist and federalist 
structures that will make possible that dispersion of power that 
Mr. Narayan, for one, spoke of the other day in our socio- 
logical study-group. 

Concerning the religious question, I think that that, too, has 
changed its aspect, in a world so profoundly transformed. And 

173 



Jeanne Hersch 

I would like to point out, for one thing, that when people begin 
to ask questions, as we have been doing here, about the possible 
value of faith In a world such as that of today, either In a 
country's development or In the education of its children, or for 
the purposes of some other result which in Itself is excellent, It 
means that, without realizing It, they are already opting against 
faith. I do not want to go more fully into this idea, but I think 
it is fundamental. One is not really talking about faith unless 
one understands that. 

Another point raised was whether religious faith was com- 
patible with freedom. From the angle of freedom, and from a 
standpoint outside faith, one can only judge religious institu- 
tions. One may ask whether a particular religious institution 
promotes freedom or militates against it. But one cannot ask 
whether faith promotes freedom, because for those who have 
faith, faith and freedom are one and the same thing. 

Then I think that the distinction between the category of 
'believers' and that of ' unbelievers ' is no longer as clear-cut as 
it may have been in other epochs. I want to make it clear that I 
am not trying to blur the outlines in order to bring everybody 
into agreement. On the contrary, I realize that there are believers 
and unbelievers. But I think that the quality has some resem- 
blance to the 'uncertain halo' of which Schwarz-Bart speaks in 
Le Dernier des Justes. Those of you who have read the novel will 
remember that in the Levy family, whose story it relates, there 
was one just man in each generation. But a time came when no 
one was absolutely certain who he was. And Schwarz-Bart tells 
us that from then on, In the Levy family, the halo became a kind 
of question-mark, for no one was sure behind whose head it was 
placed. This idea of a suspended halo expresses more or less 
what I think about the distinction between believers and 
unbelievers. 

As long as we are dealing with the subject simply on the level 
of external, theoretical discussion, the distinction is of little 
consequence. But when it comes to freedom, I feel but this is 
my personal conviction, which I offer, of course, for discussion 
I feel that freedom loses its meaning once all species of trans- 
cendence, that is to say, all species of reference to reality which 
transcends the practical sphere, is abolished. I think that when 
we reduce reality to mere immanence, history is reduced to a 
technical composition. And to know what to do in a technical 

174 



Philosophical Remarks Concerning the Contemporary World 

composition, one must be an engineer. So in that case it becomes 
logical and sensible to entrust history to engineers. But I think 
pure Immanence Is an error, and precisely for that reason there 
are not and cannot be any engineers properly equipped to build 
history. That is why and here I come back, after wandering so 
far, to my original theme pure Immanence, in my opinion, 
cancels out the actual, living present. It restores the objective 
continuity of time, which Is nobody's time. It abolishes the 
decisive link between a past which has occurred and a future 
which is unknown the link constituted by the present moment, 
that Instant In which freedom can live. 



175 



Criticism and Discussion 



SIDNEY HOOK : . . . a naturalistic view of man . . . 

The paper of Madame Hersch has an aesthetic quality which is 
extremely attractive and I hesitate to raise certain difficulties of 
an analytical character with it, but I am sure she would under- 
stand that I feel I should do less than justice to her contribution 
if I did not ask for more light. My first question is whether or not 
she has distinguished clearly between different conceptions of 
freedom which she uses interchangeably here and which makes 
it very difficult for some of us to understand. She speaks of 
freedom in one sense as opposed to determinism ; she identifies 
freedom in some places with discontinuity, freedom with chance. 
This is the old traditional question of freedom versus deter- 
minism and I, for one, do not see its relevance at all to the second 
conception of freedom, which is freedom from coercion, free- 
dom from the arbitrary imposition of someone else's will. No 
matter what theory one has about determinism, or about chance 
and one can raise certain philosophical difficulties with the 
view that has been taken in relation to that they are not rele- 
vant to the question of the conditions under which human 
beings can express what they desire; how to abolish tyranny 
over the human mind. One can hold the same views of deter- 
minism and come to different conclusions about the nature and 
even the validity of coercion. If a man holds my hand and pre- 
vents me from moving, he is coercing me ; if he lets me go, he is 
not coercing me. Now in either case, those who accept the 
postulate of determinism would say : the action is determined. 
But the determinism of those actions does not bear upon the 
question of whether a man should be coerced, of whether 
we agree with Hobbes or whether we agree with Mill, both of 
whom were determinists but who stood at opposite ends of the 
political spectrum. And I find a third conception of freedom and 
liberty here which I, for one, cannot connect with either one of 
the other two ; in speaking of religious faith, Madame Hersch 

177 



Criticism and Discussion 

tells us: 'Faith for those who have It is liberty.' Now this, of 
course, sounds like a very arbitrary definition, but on what 
conception can one derive a theory of liberty which Identifies it 
with faith, with spontaneity and with freedom from coercion? I 
think these three concepts are logically independent of each 
other and do not shed light on the subject. Certainly Augustine 
had faith, Paul had faith but I wouldn't say they have faith In 
liberty in a sense In which we are fighting for liberty today ; a 
man might have faith and still not believe in liberty. My second 
point is one in which I can express a considerable and cordial 
measure of agreement with Madame Hersch. She says that It is 
necessary in our time to Invent new methods of education, new 
methods of distributing power, new methods of creativity In life. 
I thoroughly agree. I caH that the process of creative Intelli- 
gence. But to do that, we have to bring to bear some of those 
powers which I'm afraid have been criticized in terms of engin- 
eering ; invention is very close to engineering. She seems to be 
calling for a method of social engineering. Now, I don't like the 
word 6 social engineering' because it Is a jest, implying that when 
we deal with social affairs we are dealing with material that can 
be assimilated to the things in the physical world and that we 
are going to treat human beings as if they were so much cement 
and metal and so on. But if we look away from that simplifica- 
tion, the essence of the application of methods of creative Intelli- 
gence is the extension of this scientific method which Is based, 
if I understand the word, upon the immanence of man. Now I 
should like to ask: Precisely why does it follow that if one 
believes that man is immanent in nature one cannot believe in 
liberty? Obviously man can believe in transcendence and deny 
liberty. We might refer to the existentialist theologians who 
continuate a long and venerable tradition and who tell us that 
from the transcendental conception of man both good and evil 
are equally Irrelevant. Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, when 
he discusses the Abraham-Isaac legend, calls attention to the 
fact that a transcendental view must lead to what he calls a 
suspension of the ethical. He says that from the standpoint of 
the absolute and the transcendent, Abraham acts like a mur- 
derer. But he maintains you cannot judge him, or if you judge 
him from a moral point of view then you are not judging him 
from a religious point of view. Karl Barth, his modern disciple, 
tells us that God loves Stalin and Hitler just as much as he loves 

178 



Criticism and Discussion 

their victims. Well, that tells us something about Karl Barth 
perhaps more than about God. But it Is quite clear to me that 
in the sense In which we are concerned with freedom from 
coercion, which Is the basic political Issue, it has to be proven 
and not merely asserted that one who takes a naturalistic view of 
man on the basis of the only reliable knowledge that we have, 
has no right to believe in freedom. 

JEANNE HERSCH: . . .freedom experienced by the individual . . . 

I will try to reply to Mr. Sidney Hook, but that is ex- 
tremely difficult, because what he talked about was worlds apart 
from what 1 tried to talk about. We both want more light, of 
course ; but light Is not always what people Imagine It to be. And 
sometimes there may be clarity in the foreground of certain 
ideas, yet that very clarity may conceal the darkness that lies 
behind. There is sometimes a screen of clarity that conceals the 
truth. And it seems to me that the terms you use form a kind of 
screen of clarity which conceals a sort of gaping void that lies 
behind them, instead of shedding light on it. And those dark 
depths are of great importance In our life. I will take your ques- 
tions and do my best to answer them. 

You began by saying that I ought to have drawn a distinction 
between three types of freedom. the freedom that is spon- 
taneity, the freedom that is absence of coercion, and the freedom 
which, for the believer, is indistinguishable from faith. You 
challenge me to explain in which of these three senses I was using 
the word 'freedom*. The fact is that I wasn't using It in any of 
those senses. I was speaking of freedom experienced. Freedom 
observed as spontaneity, from outside, appears to be a choice ; 
but that is not what I meant. I meant freedom as experienced 
by the Individual, nothing else. Regarded from outside, such 
freedom appears, I think, as an interruption in the deteraiinist 
explanations. It is not experienced as such. Kant, of course, was 
quite right in affirming that the determinists are perfectly en- 
titled to investigate the new phenomenon which appears after 
this break in continuity and try to reduce It by causal explana- 
tions. That Is a perfectly legitimate undertaking, but it does not 
get rid of the break in continuity, which is caused by the very 
presence of freedom. I was in no way referring here to political 
freedom, that is to say, to freedom as absence of coercion. I 

179 



Criticism and Discussion 

assure you I often think of it. But today I took my stand on the 
ground which in my opinion makes necessary, and justifies and 
feeds, the struggle for the preservation of the form of freedom 
which is constituted by the absence of coercion. On the political 
plane, where freedom consists in the absence of coercion, it is 
merely absence as you very rightly said. And one cannot fight 
solely for an absence. So that absence must have a substantial 
meaning somewhere or other. And that is what I tried to talk 
about. 

As for what I said about the believer's identification of faith 
with freedom, you think that is an arbitrary definition. But it is 
not a definition at all. It would be absurd to define freedom in 
terms of faith, for the very good reason that there is no word 
more difficult to define than 'faith'. All I said was (and without 
giving it as my own view, because to do that would have been 
to arrest the wandering halo I spoke of ; so I did not say that 
for me faith and freedom were one and the same thing) that 
for the believer who speaks from within his faith, the question 
'Does faith contribute to freedom?' is meaningless, because he 
regards the two as absolutely identical. Or rather, as one and the 
same thing. That was all I said. And I cannot go further into it, 
for the matter at issue is the situation of the believer, and it 
seems to me that even he himself can hardly talk about it. You 
raised the objection that in the case of St. Augustine faith did 
not mean faith in freedom. I never said that faith necessarily 
meant faith in freedom. I said that for those who have faith, the 
heart of faith and the heart of freedom are one and the same 
thing. That's all. One can, of course, have faith and not live in 
freedom. But when one does not live in freedom, but has faith, 
there probably remains a spark of freedom which is intangible, 
and that is just what Socrates was referring to when he was 
dying, for instance. And that is what all those who had faith 
have referred to lashed to a post and declaring that all the 
same, they were free. It would be an abominable sophistry, of 
course, to make out that since, whatever happens, that ultimate 
freedom remains intangible, there is no point in fighting for 
freedom on the political level. That would be the worst of spiri- 
tual operations, the worst abuse. But the possibility of such an 
abuse does not prevent that last spark from having its meaning, 
and perhaps even a meaning that carries all the others with it. 

Referring to new methods, you said that invention is closely 

180 



Criticism and Discussion 

related to engineering. I know so little about the world of 
machines that I am almost afraid of talking about it. But it 
seems to me that if engineering is closely related to invention, it 
is precisely because it involves an element of invention which is 
truly creative, not merely a change in the positions of manu- 
factured parts. In that sense, it is true, it is the same thing. In so 
far as invention plays a part in engineering (and it undoubtedly 
does), they are the same thing. But the 'engineer 9 as I used the 
word means someone who 5 as the Marxists put it, 4 holds the 
key to history 9 . For such men history has no more mystery, no 
more secrets ; their explanations exhaust its reality and conse- 
quently exhaust the reality of man and his life. If anyone can 
really master such knowledge, we need only leave it to him to 
arrange things for the best, with no interference ; and it would 
be unreasonable not to accept the domination of such an 
engineer. But what I was talking about was the meaning, which 
evades learning, science and technique and which in any case 
already lies at the heart of science and technique, as part of the 
reason why we prefer the true to the false. The preference for 
truth as against falsehood is not scientific. It underlies science, 
but it is not scientific. The impulse towards the truth is not 
scientific. And in my opinion that irreducible root is indispen- 
sable if we are to preserve the meaning and the place of freedom. 
You asked me why I linked transcendence with freedom and 
immanence with loss of freedom. As a matter of fact I have 
already answered that point, because your third question is 
more or less the same as your second, perhaps even as the first. 
Because the same thing lies at the centre of all these questions, 
doesn't it? You quoted, from Kierkegaard and from Earth, two 
sentences which I agree seem particularly shocking at a first 
glance. But I would be ready to take up the defence of those two 
sentences, to make a commentary on them, and I think I could 
justify them. For if we leave God his divine mystery and if we 
leave the term 'love* the mysterious sense it takes on when 
applied to God, the words 'God loves the Nazis as much as 
their victims' is not only justified but indispensable. In any case 
Karl Earth's past entitles him to write such things, for it rules out 
any possible ambiguity. 



181 



Criticism and Discussion 

RAJA RAO: . * . where is freedom if not in transcendency? . . . 

I hate to remind you that I come of a civilization which has a 
certain wisdom and a certain stability, so that we can speak with 
a certain impartiality. For us in India, freedom means liberation 
freedom is a process, liberation is its conclusion. The con- 
clusion of what? Can one really be free when one still has a 
body? 

Mr. Hook spoke of physical coercion ; so it begins with the 
physical world, the world where one has a body ; after that we 
come to the psychological world, which is conditioned, as Mr. 
Hook is conditioned, as we are all conditioned. So where is 
freedom, if not in transcendency, of which faith is a kind of 
popularization? 

Freedom is the very heart of faith, which I will call the light 
that irradiates faith that is what it is. I am in full agreement 
with Madame Hersch, I think, in saying that unless human 
beings can see themselves and see what Is the nature of true 
freedom, which is transcendency, man will never be free. 

I would like to ask Madame Hersch, is not the real question 
in the West, that there is a real, metaphysical conflict between 
antiquity and Christianity? I think that until that conflict is 
settled you will always have philosophers, you will always have 
nihilism. 

JEANNE HERSCH: . . . there mil always be philosophers . . . 

I would like to thank Mr. Rao. I think there is one extremely 
important point on which I cannot agree with him. This is the 
question of the body. He wonders how one can be free when one 
has a body. I personally, as a good Westerner, would like to ask 
how one can be free when one hasn't got a body. For me, one of 
the characteristics of Western thought is that it is linked with the 
body 'a soul in a body', as Rimbaud says. I don't know what 
freedom without a body could be like. I don't say it doesn't 
exist; but for me, it passes human understanding. That, of 
course, leads to great divergence between your ideas and mine. 
You said that so long as the conflict between antiquity and 
Christianity continues, there will always be philosophers and 
there will always be nihilism. I'm going to make a confession : I 
hope there will always be philosophers and that there will 

182 



Criticism and Discussion 

always be nihilism. For I hope there will always be faith and life, 
and there can only be faith and life while there Is nihilism, and 
philosophers, and problems, and dramas, and difficulties. And 
it seems to me that the difficulties are due to the very fact that 
the plane Mr. Hook spoke of the political plane, where free- 
dom has to have elbow-room to exist without coercion is by 
no means divided from the plane I myself spoke of. In my opin- 
ion neither of those planes can exist without the other. And the 
one on which I took my stand today in order to talk about 
freedom becomes quite artificial unless it is also slanted towards 
political action, in order to bring about on the social plane that 
absence of coercion to which we have referred. 



183 



A Postscript 
MICHAEL POLANYI 



ON returning from his meeting with Krushchev, held over the 
first week-end of June 1961, President Kennedy reported: 

*The facts of the matter are that the Soviets and ourselves give 
wholly different meanings to the same words : war, peace, de- 
mocracy and popular will. We have wholly different views of right 
and wrong and what is an internal affair and what is aggression. 
And above all, we have wholly different concepts of where the 
world is and where it is going.' 

How did we get here and where do we go from here? This 
was, in effect, the question I put to the meeting in Berlin, a year 
earlier, by asking them to discuss my paper 'Beyond Nihilism*. 

Confronted with this question, people think first of the impact 
of industrialization. But sitting as we did in the Congress Hall 
of Berlin, a few hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate 
which marks the frontier between the two halves of the world 
dominated by the two different systems of ideas it was obvious 
that their disparity would not be explained by differences in 
industrial development. There is no great difference in this re- 
spect on either side of the Brandenburg Gate, and what is more, 
there is no difference in the degree or history of industrialization 
of the * Federal Republic of Germany' under Adenauer and the 
'German Democratic Republic' under Ulbricht. Industrializa- 
tion may offer an opportunity for the spreading of new ideas, 
but it neither produces them nor lends them power to convince 
men. 

The immediate reason for the dominance of distinctive ideas 
all over the eastern zone of Germany is obviously the presence 
of some twenty divisions of Russian troops ready to uphold the 
Communist government against the opposition which would 
otherwise have swept it away along with the whole system of 
distinctive ideas which it imposed on its people. 

185 



Michael Polanyi 

But this cannot either be the root of the matter. It leaves 
unexplained how the power of Communist governments origin- 
ally came into existence at the centres from which it sub- 
sequently spread to other parts of the world. And it leaves 
unexplained also how a system of ideas, in many ways similar 
to that of Communism, had established, less than twenty years 
earlier, the equally oppressive rule of National Socialism all 
over Germany. 

We must face the fact that these disasters of the twentieth 
century were primarily brought about by groups of fanatics who 
gained influence over broad masses. We must recognize indeed 
that these ideas so different from our own, which President 
Kennedy met with in Vienna, are still echoing throughout the 
planet and still gain adherents, particularly among the more 
educated people. We must acknowledge that these people 
embrace these ideas with fervent hopes for humanity, dedicated 
to fight for them and to suppress any opposition to them. 

The main difficulty in understanding the power of modern 
totalitarian ideas is the habit of thinking of them in terms of the 
conflict between progress and reaction. They are not part of the 
struggle that has dominated men's minds since the Enlighten- 
ment shattered Christian dogmas and the French Revolution 
shattered feudalism in Europe. The revolutions of the twentieth 
century are not in line with this conflict. They do not aim at 
restoring either the dogmas or authorities against which the 
Enlightenment and the French Revolution fought. They are 
dogmatic and oppressive in an entirely new way which by a 
strange logical process assimilates for its purposes the great 
passions of scepticism and social reform which first achieved 
free thought and popular government in Europe and America. 

The biography of Karl Marx by Isaiah Berlin has a passage 
which reveals this transmutation. It reads : 

'The manuscripts of the numerous manifestos, professions of 
faith and programmes of action to which he [Marx] appended Ms 
name, ^ still bear the strokes of the pen and the fierce marginal 
comments with which he sought to obliterate all references to eter- 
nal justice, the equality of man, the rights of individuals or nations, 
the liberty of conscience, the fight for civilization and other' 
such phrases which were the stock in trade ... of the democratic 
movements of Ms time ; he looked upon these as so much wortMess 
cant indicating confusion of thought and ineffectiveness in action.* 

186 



A Postscript 

Why did Marx so fiercely obliterate all references to justice, 
equality and freedom from Ms manifestos? Because he believed 
he had far better, more honest and intelligent grounds on which 
to achieve these aims. He had written : 

*It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines 
their existence but conversely it is their social existence that deter- 
mines their consciousness.' 

To him, therefore 3 the revolution which would transform the 
existence of society became the primary aim and a true embodi- 
ment of his demand for righteousness. Even his own resolve to 
fight for this revolution was disguised in the form of a scientific 
sociology which predicted its inevitable approach, by virtue of 
its immensely increased productive capacity. 

Such an ideology simultaneously satisfies both the demands 
for scientific objectivity and the ideals of social justice, by in- 
terpreting man and history in terms of power and profit, while 
injecting into this materialistic reality the messianic passion for 
a free and righteous society. 

The potency of this combination has its counterpart in the 
weakness of the position confronting it : the position that v> e 
ourselves are trying to uphold. Our scientific outlook conflicts 
with our moral convictions, as it denies their objective justifica- 
tion. Our most fervent beliefs falter on our lips as their authen- 
ticity is questioned by our critical powers. Words like those of 
Woodrow Wilson invoking the conscience of world opinion, 
which once aroused Europe, sound hollow today. Our in- 
tellectual conscience has driven our moral convictions under- 
ground. But these antinomies which make the liberal mind 
stagger and fumble, are the joy and strength of Marxism : for 
the more far-flung are our moral aspirations and the more 
severely objectivistic is our outlook, the more powerful is a 
combination in which these contradictory principles mutually 
,iinforce each other. We must face the fact that our own ideals, 
though true and right, are cramped by an internal conflict and 
tortured by a self-doubt which our opponents have eliminated, 
by embodying their moral aspirations in a scientism which de- 
fines their own power as the ultimate goal and moral purpose 
of mankind. 

Some contributors to the discussion of my paper have called 
this hypocrisy. It is actually the inverse of it. Hypocrisy conceals 

N 187 



Michael Polanyi 

lust for power behind a screen of moral professions ; but Bol- 
sheviks silence their moral aspirations and identify them with 
an unconditional support of Bolshevik power. They may some- 
times sound sanctimonious, but their strength lies in being 
frankly hardboiled. An analysis of the chief propagandists 
writings of Lenin and Stalin shows that ninety-four to ninety- 
nine per cent of the references to the Communist Party and its 
activities describe it as seizing, manipulating and consolidating 
power. 1 

This, surely, is the inverse of hypocrisy. Its spearhead is 
indeed to accuse our own society as hypocritical, for professing 
ideals of truth, liberty and justice against which it often offends 
and cannot help offending. I have described therefore the 
structure of Marxism as a form of 'moral inversion 5 and under 
this label I have classed it with other mentalities which have a 
similar structure and are, moreover, rooted in the same his- 
torical antecedents. 2 This kinship has been criticized in the dis- 
cussion, as if it identified the political types linked by kinship. 
But elephants and whales are both mammals and yet quite 
different animals. Marxism and Nazism are also very different, 
even though they have a similar. structure and spring from 
common origins. Their kindred structurerhave different con- 
tents; Marxism is a revolutionary utilitarianism, Nazism a 
revolutionary romanticism. But their seductivity is of a similar 
kind ; it lies in offering paths of intense political action to men 
estranged by a moral rebellion armed with moral scepticism, 
a combination which I have equated not without historical 
reasons with nihilism. 

I must digress here to impress on the reader that I have not in- 
vented the problem which I am trying to solve here. Many authors 
have seen it. It was brilliantly introduced by Roger Callois. 3 
Marx and Engels, he says, built up their formidable theory for 

1 See G. A. Almond: The Appeals of Communism, Princeton 1954, p. 22. 

2 'Moral inversion' can be understood as a counterpart to Freudian 'sub- 
limation*. 'Sublimation* designates the (alleged) transmutation of sexual libido 
into nobler manifestations of the mind, while moral inversion refers to the 
opposite transmutation of noble ideals into a quest for power and profit. 
Accordingly, I regard Freud's theory of sublimation as an expression of the 
same reductionist urge pervading our modern mentality, which, consistently 
applied, led to moral inversion. 

3 Roger Callois: Description du Marxisme (GaHiowd, 1950), 

188 



A Postscript 

the purpose of concealing from themselves and others that they 
were following the voice of their generous conscience, instilled 
by an education which their theory unmasked as fundamentally 
hypocritical. They transmuted their moral demands by uttering 
them in the form of scientific predictions. J. Plamenatz 1 
struggled with the same paradox and concluded "'Scientific 
socialism" is a logical absurdity, a myth, a revolutionary slogan, 
the happy inspiration of two moralists who wanted to be unlike 
all moralists before them. 9 H. B. Acton 2 examines this logical 
absurdity and hints at the origins of its convincing power : 'The 
Marxist can derive moral precepts from his social science . . . 
to the extent that they already form, because of the vocabulary 
used, a concealed and unacknowledged part of it.' Carew Hunt 3 
reveals this practice in the following quotation from Lenin: 
'Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society.' 
The struggle for power is set up here as the ultimate criterion 
of morality in words justifying this struggle by a moral con- 
demnation of capitalism. The period of pre-Marxist Russian 
nihilism in which moral passions were first embodied in the 
revolutionary struggle for power is described by E. H. Carr 4 in 
his biography of Bakunin. It was Nechayev, around 1870, who 
took the final step of abandoning the romantic aspirations of 
the previous generation and raising revolution to the status of 
an absolute good, overriding any moral obligations. The en- 
suing internal contradiction is analysed for Russian Marxism 
by Bochenski. 5 Moral laws, he says, are appealed to and then 
it is denied that any such laws exist. In describing the militant 
mentality of the Soviets, Richard Lowenthal reveals its contra- 
dictions in paradoxical terms. He speaks of an 'unconscious 
and indeed fanatical hypocrisy [a] ruthless immoralism justi- 
fied by the subjectively sincere belief in the millennial rule of 
saints.' But how can hypocrisy, which is a pretence, be fanatical? 
And how can it be also an immoralism that is, an open denial 
of the ideas invoked by hypocrisy? Lowenthal joins issue with 
me for rejecting the current description of the Soviet mentality 
as a 'secular religion'. I regard this term as misleading for it 

1 John Plamenatz: German Marxism and Russian Communism (1954), p. 50. 

2 H. B. Acton: The Illusion of an Epoch (1955), p. 190. 

s R. N. Carew Hunt: The Theory and Practice of Communism (1950), p. 80. 
4 E. H. Carr : Michael Bakunin (1937), p. 376. 

3 Bochenski: Der Sowietrussiche Dialektisck? Materialismus (1950), p. 156. 

189 



Michael Polanyi 

might equally apply to any fervent patriotic or social movement 
forming part of the liberal tradition which Is the primary 
opponent of Communism. 1 The problem I want to face was 
clearly formulated by Hannah Arendt: 2 'Bolshevik assurance 
Inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary 
moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propa- 
ganda . . .' An attempt to explain why this concealment of moral 
purpose behind professions of immoralism is so stable and se- 
ductive has recently been made by E. E. Hirschmatin: 3 'We 
must realize that this disregard [of humanitarian Idealism] has 
been a source of strength not of weakness. For because men in 
their moral professions have for so long not meant what they 
said, because the moral will has not seemed a reality which men 
could trust, therefore, by seeming to depend less on moral 
profession and moral will, they seemed the more to mean what 
they said and the more to rely upon realities.' Mr. Hirschmann 
sees a kindred tendency underlying 'the greatest self-conscious 
assault on humanitarian ideals yet seen in history, that of the 
Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis'. Nearly forty years earlier Meinecke 4 
had interpreted the tragic failure of Imperial German mentality 
as due to the Idea that the only true morality of a nation was 

1 The 'famous speech at Amsterdam on September 8, 1872' to which 
Lowenthal refers as contradicting my statement that for Marx violence was the 
proper aim of a scientific socialism is famous only because it is at variance with 
the most emphatic statements of Marx to the contrary : 

'The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly 
declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all 
existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic 
revolution. ' 

Tills peroration of the Communist Manifesto was a million times more effective 
as Marx's teaching than his speech in Amsterdam saying that in certain cases 
socialism could be achieved constitutionally. 

Lowenthal says that Marx has drawn up fairly precise outlines for his own 
Utopia. The only text I can think of consists of a few vague pages in the 
* Critique of the Gotha Programme* written as a letter to Bracke of which 
Engels found a copy among his papers in 1891, nine years after the death of 
Marx. On the eve of the Russian Revolution Lenin could find no other 
Marxian basis than this document left unpublished for sixteen years first by 
Marx and then by Engels for shaping the programme of the future society In 
The State and Revolution (1917). 

- Hannah Arendt: The Burden of our Time (1951), P- 301. 
s E. E. Hirschmann: On Human Unity (1961), p. 124. 

4 Meinecke: Die Idee der Staatsraison (1929), passim. Immanence is also 
called here 'Monismus' and related to Hegel's *Identitatslehre > . 

190 



A Postscript 

Immanent In its will to power. I think one could use the term 
'immanent morality' instead of 'inverted morality' and I have 
occasionally done so. But 'immanence 5 lacks the terrifying 
overtones of 'Inversion 9 , as a state in which moral passions 
are transmuted Into the hidden fuel of absolute violence. 

The morally inverted mentality can be Individualistic, un- 
political this I call nihilism. In my paper, 'nihilism' means 
neither moral depravity nor moral indifference. Depraved in- 
dividuals have often joined company with modern nihilists and 
become instruments of the revolutions of the twentieth century. 
But by themselves they could have only produced a crime-wave 
not made revolutions. Their mentality Is poles apart from 
that of the personage first identified as a nihilist by Turgenev 
In Ms hero Bazarov. This character, which has made history, 
represents the rebellious Russian intelligentsia of the 1860's 
who repudiated all existing bonds of society in the name of an 
absolute utilitarianism, of which they hoped that it would 
liberate men and make them all brothers. 

The romantic nihilism first propounded by Nietzsche in Ger- 
many, was likewise a moral protest against existing morality. 
'This shop,' writes Nietzsche, 'where they manufacture ideals 
seems to me to stink of lies.' In place of this hypocrisy he sets 
the noble ideal of ' something perfect, wholly achieved, happy, 
magnificently triumphant, something still capable of inspiring 
fear'. He finds it represented in Napoleon, 'that synthesis of the 
brutish with the more than human'. 

The beginnings of a nihilism associated with moral protest 
go back further. Diderot speaks of it already in 1763 in Le 
Neveu de Rameau whose immoralism justifies Itself by the 
hypocrisy of society. Soon after, Rousseau made a monumental 
declaration of moral Independence in his Confessions, exhibiting 
his vices as nature's naked truth. And later in the century the 
Marquis de Sade gave an account of his cruelty and lust, de- 
riving intellectual and moral superiority for his acts from a 
scientism which reduces man to a machine and a political theory 
which denounces laws as the will of the stronger. 

Owing to its moral and intellectual appeal, nihilism has served 
as a cultural leaven throughout the past two centuries. A rebel- 
lious immoralism has bred the modern bohemien in France and 
the disaffected intellectual throughout the continent of Europe, 
and these alienated groups have contributed decisively to the 

191 



Michael Polanyi 

renewal of art and thought since the second half of the nine- 
teenth century. In this cultural process the two kinds of 
nihilism, the 'utilitarian' and the 'romantic', were interwoven. 
But I shall pick out one thread of the latter kind which leads 
us back to the social and political scene and to the romantic 
branch of modern totalitarianism. The movement which in 
France produced the boheme and in Russia the revolutionary 
intelligentsia, found an even wider outlet in the German Youth 
Movement. From small beginnings at the end of the nineteenth 
century, it canie to comprise millions of boys and girls by the 
end of the First World War. At a famous congress on the Hohe 
Meissner Mountain in 1913, it dedicated itself to a fervent 'inner 
truthfulness/ condemning existing morality as a bondage im- 
posed by a corrupt society and affirming instead the romantic 
values idealized by Nietzsche, Wagner and more recently 
Stefan George. I remember no instance in which this youth 
movement protested against the rise of National Socialism, 
while there is evidence that it amply contributed to the ranks 
of Hitler's supporters. The same romantic nihilism spoke as 
follows on the rise of Hitler to power in 1934 through Oswald 
Spengler: 'Man is a beast of prey . . . would be moralists . . . 
are only beasts of prey with their teeth broken . . . remember 
the larger beasts of prey are noble creatures . . . without the 
hypocrisy of human morals due to weakness.' * 

Nazi fanaticism was rooted in the same conviction of the 
irrelevance of moral motives in public life, which Marxism had 
expressed in terms of historic materialism, and which caused 
Marx to eliminate furiously any appeals to moral ideals from 
his manifestos. Fascists believed with Marx that such moral 
appeals were but rationalizations of power. Hence their con- 
tempt of moralizing and their moral justifications of violence 
as the only honest mode of political action. 

Such is the kinship between the ideas which gained fanatical 
support among revolutionaries and broad influence on the 
masses of our age. Such the convincing power of an inversion 
by which scepticism and moral passions reinforce each other in 
acting on minds whose moral convictions are hamstrung by 
scepticism. Revolutionary regimes admittedly continue to rule 
by oppressive violence ; but their immense efforts of propaganda 

1 Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (1934) quoted by Leslie Paul, 
The Annihilation of Man (London, 1944), p. 128. 

192 



A Postscript 

show that they rely on violence only in combination with the 
power of their ideas. 

Whether we are to fight or to submit to live or to die our 
first duty must be to recognize the awful fact that these ideas 
are highly stable and seductive. And we must face also the fact 
that their force and seduction is not due at least not primarily 
due to an evocation of evil instincts, but is gained by satisfying 
in its own manner the same ideals which we ourselves hold and 
which we are defending against their attack. 

So much in answer of the first part of our question. It explains 
how the world came to be where it is divided as it is. 

Now the second part of the question : Where does the world 
go from here? I must not respond to this without first making 
clear some obvious limitations of any answer I may give to it. 
The process of inversion which I have described has not taken 
place everywhere this is precisely why the world is divided 
today. Even many revolutionary regimes of the twentieth cen- 
tury are untouched by inversion. Most of the new Asiatic and 
African countries have achieved independence upholding the 
traditional ideals of liberalism ; I cannot take into account here 
the wide variety of conditions in these countries. Nor can I deal 
in detail with the great differences between the Communist 
countries, ranging from fanatical fury in China to the mere 
ritual observance of Marxism in Yugoslavia. I can only suggest 
that these differences be analysed in terms of the trends which 
I am trying to identify. Finally, though I may tell which way the 
world is going, I cannot prophesy where it will arrive, 

I believe that the predominant trend of human thought in the 
last ten years has been a retreat from the most extreme forms 
of inversion. The belief that the rule of the Communist Party 
embodies all the hopes of humanity, and that its very existence 
is a full compensation for the fact that it does not fulfil them ; 
that its successes should be ascribed to its peculiar excellence, 
while its failure be always regarded as incidental this bias 
which thrives on its own absurdity, by rendering itself totally 
unapproachable to argument; this peculiar milieu of the 
twentieth century which protects its own blazing credulity by 
a steel armour of scepticism; this condition which is capable 
of combining highest intelligence and morality in a teaching 
which reduces them both to epiphenomena of power and profit 
it is no longer as stable and seductive as it used to be, 

193 



Michael Polanyi 

This has been no mere weakening due to lassitude. It was a 
reaffirmation of truth and of morality and the arts, as intrinsic 
powers of the mind that caused the leading Hungarian Com- 
munist intellectuals to rebel against a regime which had 
showered them with benefits. This reaffinnation was momen- 
tous, not only because those who uttered it were abandoning 
a place in the sun for the shadow of death, but because it was the 
outcome of a bitter internal struggle in minds divided between 
two irreconcilable conceptions of conscience. This liberation 
and re-establishment of thought from its reduction to the func- 
tions of ideology has been the mainspring of all revisionism 
within the Soviet empire, and of the many defections from 'the 
god that failed 9 throughout the world. 

This movement took on many forms, because any conviction 
that acknowledges the power of thought in its own right could 
equally express it. The beliefs to which the modern mind turns 
beyond nihilism, comprise all the main ideas which prevailed 
before the descent into nihilism. In my paper I gave a list of 
three, each defined by its historic past : nationalism, religion and 
sceptical enlightenment. Today I would add two more, namely 
romantic enlightenment and its descendant, modern existen- 
tialism. But the list is inexhaustible. A man who has broken out 
of prison might be found in any place to which he had access 
before he was imprisoned. 

Some of those criticizing nationalism or religion seem to have 
thought that they were opposing my apologia of them. But I 
had merely said that minds recoiling from nihilism sometimes 
have done so by renewing their national or religious dedication, 
and I have spoken in the same breath also of sceptical enlighten- 
ment. I said that : 

*. . . the sceptical mood of the enlightenment itself has been given 
a new lease of life. The more sober pragmatist attitude towards 
public affairs which has spread since 1950 through England and 
America, Germany and Austria reproduces in its repudiation of 
ideological strife the attitude of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists 
towards religious bigotry.* 

This was indeed the only path in which I saw a hope for the 
future. 'Perhaps,' I said, 'the present recoil may be stabilized 
by the upsurge of a more clear-sighted political conscience.' 
And I quoted as an example the way religious conflict had even- 
tually been overcome in England and America. 

194 



A Postscript 

1 Civility prevailed over religious strife and a society was founded 
which was dynamic and yet united. May not Europe repeat this 
feat? May we not learn from the disasters of the past forty years 
to establish a civic partnership, united in its resolve on continuous 
reforms our dynamism restrained by the knowledge that radic- 
alism will throw us back into disaster the moment we try to act 
out its principles literally?' 

I have repeated these words here in reply to Sidney Hook's 
essay 'Enlightenment and Radicalism" in which lie too recom- 
mends a return to Enlightenment as a cure to our age, 
and curiously conveys this by a strong attack on my sup- 
posed denigration of the ideals of Enlightenment. This is due 
to the fact that lie identifies these ideals with the American and 
British systems of continuous reform through self-government, 
while on the other hand he thinks that 'the chief causes of the 
Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions have very little to do with doc- 
trinal beliefs. They are to be found in the First World War and 
its consequences *. So when I say that the catastrophes of the 
twentieth century were a manifestation *of a sceptical ration- 
alism combined with a secularized fervour of Christianity* he 
believes that I am attacking rationalism just as other authors 
have thought that I am attacking Christianity; while I have 
done neither. 

In any case, whatever the proximate causes of our recent 
revolutions may have been, I think Sidney Hook would agree 
that their ideas, and the ideas represented by the Soviet govern- 
ment in particular, are still powerful and menacing. My analysis 
recognizes that they possess this force and seductiveness only 
because they are deeply rooted in ideas which we share and 
because we have also the same ancestry, which first laid the 
twin burdens of scepticism and social morality on mankind. 
If this is true, the impasse of completely different languages 
of which President Kennedy spoke, may not be unbridgeable. 
If the ideas so hostile to us derive their power from their kinship 
to our own, we might recognize in them also our own problems. 
We shall then make contact with the internal difficulties of the 
Soviet mind which are leading it to revisionism. And we shall 
no longer see this process then merely as a weakening of our 
opponents, but recognize it as a struggle of minds like our own 
against a predicament similar to our own. The revisionist who 
breaks up the Marxist inversion of moral passions and recoils 

o 195 



Michael Polanyi 

from its political immoralism, returns to our situation in which 
objectivism conflicts with the claims of moral judgment. He 
comes up then against our own problems. 

A revisionist may expose the logical contradiction in Marxism 
in terms very similar to those of the academic critics I have 
quoted. Kolakowski says to the orthodox Communist : 

'You do not let me measure your moves with a measuring rod 
of absolute values because in your opinion such values do not 
exist at all or are purely imagined. But on the other hand, you 
yourself talk about all human values which must be absolute ; 
thus silently you introduce into your doctrine axiomatic absolutism 
in a vague and equivocal way in order to destroy it immediately 
with "historical relativism"/ 1 

And in him & Communist who has survived Stalinism this in- 
sight is far more vivid than it is in us. Problems which to us are 
speculative, are re-opened by him as wounds, seemingly healed, 
that have started festering. This can teach those who take the 
foundations of liberalism to be self-evident, that they are in fact 
driven by a contradiction which only a faith more experienced 
than ours can validly transcend. 

The problem of modern man is then everywhere the same. 
He must restore the balance between his critical powers and his 
moral demands both of which are more relentless than ever. 
This may be the starting-point for a movement of intellectual 
solidarity between the civilizations arising beyond nihilism and 
the lands which have been spared the political consummation 
of nihilism. The common ground of this movement would over- 
come the division of the two mutually exclusive languages and 
might eventually guide our statesmen to find a way to co- 
existence and joint progress. 

1 L. Kolakowski, * Responsibility and History*, Nowa Kultura, September 1, 
1957, Warsaw, Quoted by East Europe, December 1957, p. 12. 



196 



KATHLEEN BLISS : General Secretary of the Church of England Board 
of Education, Research Officer of Talks Department, B.B.C., editor 
of The Christian News-Letter. Author of The Service and Status of 
Women in the Churches. 

ENZO BOERI : Director of the Institute of Human Physiology at the 
University of Ferrara, Italy; Biologist at the National Research 
Council of Naples University. Has published various scientific 
articles in Italy, France, England and the United States. 
FRANgois BONDY: Swiss essayist and journalist, Director of Publica- 
tions of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. 

A. K. BROHI : Pakistani jurist, High Commissioner for Pakistan in 
India. Has published An Adventure in Self-Expression and Funda- 
mental Law of Pakistan. 

FRANCOIS FEJTO: Journalist and writer, commentator on foreign 
policy at Agence France Presse. Author of Printemps des Peuples, 
Histoire des Democraties Populaires, Dieu et son Juif, etc. 
PIETER GEYL : Professor of History at the Universities of London and 
Utrecht up to 1958, author of many historical works, among which 
Use and Abuse of History, Revolt of the Netherlands, etc. 
HELMUT GOLLWITZER : Professor of Theology at the Free University 
of Berlin; author of Die christliche Gemeinde in der Politischen 
Welt, Die Christen unddie Atomwaffen. 

INGEMAR HEDENIUS : Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University, 
author of Sensationalism and Theology in Berkeley^ Philosophy, 
Studies in Hume's Ethics, On Law and Morals, In Search for a Fiew of 
Life and other works. 

RICHARD HENSMAN: Singhalese writer and journalist, Research 
Secretary for the Overseas Council, London, and editor of Com- 
munity. 

JEANNE HERSCH: Professor of Philosophy, University of Geneva. 
Author of U Illusion philosophique, Ideologies et Rgalite, etc. 
WALTHER HOFER: Professor of Political Science at the University 
of Berne. Has published important collections of documents on the 
history of the Third Reich: Deutsche Geschichte, 1933-1939 and 
Dokumente des Nationalsozialismus, which have been translated into 
English, Italian and Japanese. 

197 



Biographical Notes 

SIDNEY HOOK: Professor of Philosophy at New York University. 
Author of From Hegel to Marx, Education for Modern Man, Heresy 
Yes Conspiracy No, Political Power and Personal Freedom, etc. 
ALBERT HOURANI : Professor of Modern History of the Near East ; 
Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. Has published various 
books on the problems of the Arab world, such as Syria and Lebanon 
and Minorities in the Arab World. 

PAUL IGNOTUS: author and journalist, senior editor of Irodalmi 
Ujsag (The Hungarian Literary Gazette, London). Has published 
a number of books, among which La Responsabilita degli Intellettuali 
and Political Prisoner. 

FRODE JAKOBSEN : Member of the Danish Parliament ; author, among 
other works, of Europe and Denmark, The European Movement and 
the Council of Europe. 

K. A. JELENSKI : Polish essayist and literary critic now living in Paris, 
author of La Realta DelYottobre Polacco, has contributed articles to 
Encounter, Partisan Review, Preuves, Der Monat, etc. 
HANS KOHN : Professor of History at City College, New York. Author 
of numerous books, among which The Mind of Germany, Is the 
Liberal West in Decline? 

TKEODOR LOT: Professor of Philosophy. Between Erkenntnis und 
Leben, published in 1923, and Fuhren oder Wachsealassen, pub- 
lished in 1960, has written a considerable number of essays and 
philosophical works of which the best known is Hegel. He taught 
for several years in Eastern Germany. 

KARL LOEWITH : Professor at Heidelberg University. Has published 
numerous works, among which From Hegel to Nietzsche, Meaning in 
History and Wissen, Glaube undSkepsis. 

RICHARD LOWENTHAL : Professor of Political Science, Fall University, 
Berlin. Journalist and writer, frequent contributor to The Observer. 
HERBERT LUTHY : Professor of History at the Swiss Federal Poly- 
technical School. After Montaigne (essays), published in 1953, and 
A VHeure de son Clocher (essay on France), has published an 
important book on The Protestant Bank in France from the Revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes to the Revolution. 

SALVADOR DE MADARiAGA : Spanish statesman and former Ambas- 
sador, now living in exile. He is the author of numerous books on 
history and political science, among which the most important are : 
Spaniards, Englishmen and Frenchmen, Spain, an essay on contem- 
porary history, Christopher Columbus and Portrait of Europe. 
CZESLAW MILOSZ: Polish poet, essayist and novelist, author of 
The Captive Mind, La Prise du Pouvoir, Sur les Bords de VIssa, etc., 
now professor of Slavic literatures, University of California, Berkeley. 

198 



Biographical Notes 

EHSAN KARACHI : Professor of Sociology at Teheran University. Has 
published several works on the Middle East. 
JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN : Indian statesman, retired from active 
politics in 1952 to join the Bhoodan (Land Gift) movement, 
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER : Physicist, Director of the Institute for Ad- 
vanced Study, Princeton, U.S.A. 

JOSEF PIEPER : Professor of Philosophy at Miinster University. Has 
written various books, amongst which Grundformen sozialer Spiel- 
regeln, Was helsst Philosophieren? and Ueber den Begriff der Tradi- 
tion. 

MICHAEL POLANYI: turned to Philosophy after having been Pro- 
fessor of Physics and Professor of Economics. Fellow of Merton 
College, Oxford. Author of U.S.S.R. Economics, Money and Unem- 
ployment (diagrammatic film), The Contempt of Freedom, Full Employ- 
ment and Free Trade, Science, Faith and Society, Logic of Liberty, 
Personal Knowledge, The Study of Man, etc. 
RAJA RAO: Indian writer, came to Europe at the age of 19, studying 
literature at the University of Montpellier and at the Sorbonne. He 
published his first stories in French and English. His best known 
book is The Serpent and the Rope. 

RONALD SEGAL : the South African radical writer and journalist, is 
now editor and publishet_of Africa South in Exile, published in 
London. 

HUGH SETON- WATSON : Professor at the London School of Slavonic 
Studies. Author of several books on history and Eastern Europe, he 
has recently published in London a book on the international situa- 
tion, Neither Peace nor War. 

ALTIERO SPINELLI : Italian publicist, delegate of the Congres du Peuple 
Europeen, author of Manifesto dei Federalisti Europei, UEuropa non 
cade dal Cielo, etc. 

Micmo TAKEYAMA : writer, lecturer at the University of Tokyo, editor 
of the magazine Jiyu. 

ALEX WEISSBERG-CYBULSKI : physicist and writer, directed the 
Kharkov Institute of Physical Research until his imprisonment 
during the Soviet purges. His experience is described in Ms book 
The Witches* Sabbath. 



199 



Index 



I. Contributors to the Seminar 

Bliss, Kathleen, 141-4, 149-50 
Boeri, Enzo, 160 
Bondy, Francois, 129-30 
Brohi, A. K., 116-17 
Fejto, Frangois, 71-3 
Geyl, Pieter, 76-8, 117-19 
Gollwitzer, Helmut, 152-4 
Hedenius, Ingemar, 158 
Hensman, Richard, 150-2 
Hersch, Jeanne, 122 f., 165-75, 

179-81, 182-3 

Hofer, Walther, 114-16, 138f. 
Hook, Sidney, 59-67, 135-6, 

156-8, 177-9 
Hourani, Albert, 101-7, 111-13, 

136-7 

Ignotus, Paul, 69-71 
Jakobsen, Frode, 132-3 
Jelenski, K. A., 1-13, 71 
Kohn, Hans, 73 f., 113-14 
Litt, Theodor, 79-81, 130-2 
Lowenthal, Richard, 37-57, 133-5 
Liithy, Herbert, 85-99, 109-11, 

137-8 

Madariaga, de Salvador, 75-6 
Milosz, Czeslaw, 123-5 
Naraghi, Ehsan, 125 f. 
Narayan, Jayaprakash, 154-6 
Oppenheimer, Robert, 1 60 f. 
Pieper, Joseph, 145-8 
Polanyi, Michael, 17-35, 69, 74-5, 

185-96 

Rao, Raja, 182 
Segal, Ronald, 162f. 
Seton- Watson, Hugh, 119-22, 

163 f. 

Spinelli, Altiero, 126-8 
Takeyama, Michio, 78-9 
Weissberg, Alex, 161 f. 



//. General Index 
Acton, H. B., 189 
Affluence, and dehumanization, 

153 
Africa : 

linguistic division in, 122 

nationalism in, 90, 97 f., 1 15, 120 

nationalism and State in, 128 
Aggression, disguised, 50 
Albania, 25 
Algeria, 90, 94, 121 
Almond, G. A., 188n. 
America : 

humanism in, 25 

and nationalism, 95, 115, 136 

sovereignty in, 76 

see also New England 
American Revolution, 21 
Amoralism, medieval, 44 f. 
Anabaptists, 45 
Angola, 109 
Anti-clericalism, 164 
Antinornianism, 44 
Archetypes, 85 
Arendt, Hannah, 190 
Arguments, 8 
Aristotle, 135 
Augustine, St, 178, 180 
Austria : 

decline of dynamism in, 31 

nationalism in, 134 
Authority, 

collapse of traditional, effects of, 
47 if. 

and nationalism, 127 

rejection of, 19 

Bakongo, 109 

Bakunin, Michael, 19, 40, 43, 45, 
189 



201 



Index 



Balkanization, 99 

Baltic States, 124 

Balubas, 109 

Bantu, 122 

Barth, Karl, 178-9, 181 

de Beauvoir, Simone, 29 f. 

Becker, 78 

Belgium, 119 

Bentham, Jeremy, 27, 60, 61 , 64 

Berdyaev, 41 

Beria, 54 

Berlin, Isaiah, 186 

Berlin Conference (I960), 1 

Bernstein, 62 

Bessarabia, 88 

Bochenski, 189 

Body, freedom and the, 182 

Bolsheviks, rise to power, 61 

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 141-3 

Borgias, 161 

Bossuet, 19 

Boswell, James, 22 

Britain : 

decline of dynamism in, 31 

19th-century, 24 

unification of, 93 f. 

see also England 
Buddhism, 49, 151 
Burke, 64 
Byron, 25 

Callois, Roger, 188 
Carr, E. H., 189 
Castro, Fidel, 9 

Categories, 19th-century, obso- 
lescence of, 13 
Cellini, Benveunto, 22 
Centralism, democratic, 7 
Ceylon, 151 

Chamberlain, Houston S., 61 
Change: 

failure of adaptation to social, 
51 f. 

historic, experience of, 3, 46 
Chernyshevsky, 43 
Chiliasm, medieval, 5, 18, 40 
China, 78 

Communist, 10, 55, 193 

as example to new states, 107 



Christianity, 141-2, 152 if. 

And freedom, 145 ff. 

and other religions, 152 

and secular morality, 47 ff. 

and society, 18, 20 
Churchill, Winston, 63 
Class, and individual, 167 
Cohesion, contemporary forces of, 

113 

Cohn, Norman, 18, IP, ^4ff. 
Colonies, independence of, 97 

and nationalism, 109 f., 116 
Commitment, 150 
Communism, and 

Christianity, 153 

effects of inwardness, 168 f. 

experienced, 179 

faith, 174, 178, 180, 182 

idea and reality of, 146 

inward and outward, 154 

irrationalism, 69 f., 80 

misuse of, 146 

nationalism, 96 IF. 

nihilism, 2 

Polish intelligentsia and, 71 

religion and, 145 ff. 

science and, 166 

three types, 177, 180 
Comte, Auguste, 74 
Condorcet, 19 
Congo, 86 f. 

Belgian, 109 

Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1 
Connections, interpersonal, 169 
Conscience, obedience to, 146 
Co-operatives, 124 
Counter-Reformation, 47, 48 
Croats, 88 
Cuba, 9 

Declaration of Independence, 

American, 159 
Degeneration, moral, of civilized 

man, 19 

Dehio, Ludwig, 129 
Democracy, 3, 46 

and nationalism, 91, 92, 95 
Dery, Tiber, 70, 71 
Determinism, 81, 177 



202 



Index 



Development, and independence, 

106 f. 

Diderot, 191 

Discussion, methods of, 171 ff. 
Disputes, territorial, 106 
Dissent^ 8 

Doctors, Kremlin, 31, 54 
Dogma, decline of, and morality, 

47 ff. 

Dostoievsky, 28, 29, 40, 101, 169 
Dutch Reformed Church, 162 f. 
Duty, and religious belief, 158 
Dynamic societies, two kinds, 4 
Dynamism, 

receding, 10, 24 

waxing and waning of, 31 

Economic development, ideology 

of, 106 
Education : 

adult, 172 f. 

and commitment, 150 

nationalistic, 92 
Egypt, 107, 112 

Empires, disintegration of, 101 f. 
Engels, R, 41, 129, 188 
England, 2 

inimitability of, 94 

and nationalism, 93 

religious wars, 35 

see also Britain ; logic, lack of 
Enlightenment, 2, 4, 21, 33, 60 f., 

64ff., 74, 186, 195 
Enthusiasm, 61 

Equality, Christianity and, 152 
Europe : 

Eastern, and Soviet imperialism, 
138-9 

Germany and, 132 

secret of its strength, 104, 112 

Western, expansion in 19th cen- 
tury, 104 

Evil, problem of, 25 
Excesses, moral, 17 ff. 
Existentialists : 

French, 38, 40 

and human nature, 147 
Extra-sensory perception, 149 



Extremists, reasons for victories of, 
56 

Fanaticisms (s), 

and religion, 30 

secular, 2, 3 ff. 
Fascism : 

and nationalism, 110 

as nihilism, 2 

Fatherhood of God, 155, 157 
Fear, displacement of, 169 
Federalism, 111, 123, 134 f., 136 
Feuerbach, 157 
Fisher, H.A.L., 116 
Flanders, 119, 138 
Fourier, 5, 33 
France, 9, 77 

and Algeria, 121 

and French nation, 128 

post-Revolutionary, 53 

see also French Revolution 
Francis, St, 22 
Frederick the Great, 22 
Freedom : 

adventitiousness of, 146, 148 

Christian meaning of, 159 
Free Spirits, 44, 45 
Freethinkers, and idealism, 158 
French Equatorial Africa, 109 
French Revolution, 21, 26 f., 31 
69, 76, 92, 94, 101, 186 

and nationalism, 127 
Frontiers and nationalism, 131 
Function, man's, 167 

Galileo, 160 
Gaulle, de, 127 
Geneva, 92 
Gentile, Giovanni, 46 

George, Stefan, 192 
Germany, 79 ff., 114, 185, 192 

decline of dynamism in, 31 

East, 1953 rising, 97 

failure of integration in, 129 

immoralism in, 25 

language and nationalism in, 
129 f. 

reasons for totalitarianism in, 74 
Gibbon, 20, 64 



203 



Index 



Gimes, Miklos, 71 f. 
Girondins 5 127 
Greece, revolt, 102 
Gregory VII, 18 

Gurian, Waldemar, 41 

Hay, Gyula, 32 
Hayek, F. A., 27 n. 
Health, 'Idea' of, 147 
Hegel, 30, 64 
Helvetius, 27. 92 
Herder, J. G., 131 
Hinduism, 154f. 
Hirschmann, E. E., 190 
History : 

man's relation to, 170 f. 

philosophy of, 171 

two chapters in, 116 
Hitler, Adolf, 26, 61, 192 
Hobbes, 20 f., 25, 177 
Hoffmann von Fallersleben, 130 
Holland, 77, I18f., 133 f. 
Holmes, O. W., 135 
Human nature, existentialism and, 

147 

Humanity, love of, 27 
Hume, David, 25, 61, 64 
Hungary : 

Catholicism in, 98 

Communism in, 72 

nationalism in, 98 f. 

revisionism in, 6 ff. 

rising of 1956, 1,97, 120, 124, 147 

see also intelligentsia 
Hunt, R. N. Carew, 189 
Hypocrisy, 187ff. 

of the West, 75 

Idealism : 

ethical, and faith, 158 

moral, 73 
Ideology (-ies) : 

development of, 24 

end of, 2 f., 6 ff. 

and post-revolutionary exhaus- 
tion, 53 f. 

Immanence, 174f., 178 
Immoralism : 

in Germany, 30 

personal, 22, 27, 30 



Imperialism : 

English, 94 

Soviet, 138-9 

Independence, sequelae of, 105 f. 
Independentism, 116 
India, 89, 107 
Individualism : 

romantic, 25 

Rousseau and, 23 
Industrialization, 185 
Inquisition, 146, 161, 162 
Instinct, and rationalism, 79 
Institutions : 

religious, and faith, 174 

social, and gradual reform, 60 
Insularity, English, 93 f. 
Integration, nationalism and, 111, 

114 
Intelligentsia : 

and contempt for Enlighten- 
ment, 74 

Hungarian, revolt of, 32 f., 38 f., 
54 f., 194 

revisionism and, 9 
Intolerance, and secularism, 163 f. 
Inversion, moral, 4, 26, 29, 34, 

37 f., 45, 188 
Iran, 125 

Ireland, and England, 94 
Iron Guard, 1 10 
Islam, 49, 102 
Italy, 114, 128, 129, 164 

Japan, 9. 78 
Jaures, Jean, 62, 77 
Jung, C. G., 85 

Kant, 157, 166, 179 

Keita, Modibo, 90 

Kennedy, President, 185, 195 

Kerensky, A., 63 

Kierkegaard, 178 

Kipling, R., 168 

Kirov, S., 54 

Koestler, Arthur, 69 

Kolakowski, Leszek, 8, 196 

Korea, 9 

Kossuth, L., 120 

Krushchev, N., 54 f., 62, 70, 185 



204 



Index 



Kun s Beta, 26 



Labour camps, 38 

Language, nationalism and, 88, 

121 f., 134 

League of Nations, 75 
Legitimacy, search for principle 

of, 112 

Legitimation, nationalism and, 113 
Lenin, V. I., 7, 26, 29, 38, 42 f., 

61 f., 70, 161, 189 
Liberty, faith and, 178 
Locke, 21, 25, 35, 60, 61, 64, 101 
Logic: 

English lack of, 25 ff., 47 
4 suspended ', 94, 101, 107 
Luluas, 109 

Lutheranism, German, 49 
Luxemburg, Rosa, 7, 125 

MacDougall, W., 95 

Macedonia, 88 

Machiavelli, 22 

Manessier, 173 

Mann, Golo, 129 

Mao Tse-tung, 26 

Marcel, Gabriel, 142 

Maritain, Y., 64 

Marriage, 168 

Marx, Karl, 5, 29, 38 ff., 129, 186 f. 

192 

Marxism (-Leninism), 28 f., 72, 
188 f. 

and Bolshevik victory, 61 f. 

and history, 171 

Polish, 71 

and revisionism, 73 
Mass society, 8 
Mau Mau, 95 
Meinecke, H., 30, 190 
Messianism : 

of Hebrew prophets, 17 

Lenin's, 42 f. 

new, in Asia and Africa, 10 f. 

political, para-religious, 5 

science and, 4 

and violence, 41 f. 
Metternich, 135 
Mill, J. S., 177 



Millennium, 5 9 9 

Milosz, Czes!aw 9 71 

Minorities, national, 88 

von Moltke, Heimuth, 142 f., 145 

Montesquieu, 24 

Morality : 

bourgeois, double basis of at- 
tack on, 40 

immanent, 190 f. 

intensification of, 4 

internaiization of, 48 f., 57 

Marxism and, 187 ff. 
Morley, 25 f. 
Mussolini, 40 

Nagy, Imre, 70, 71 
Napoleon, 191 
Narodnaya Volya, 42, 43 
Narodniks, 72 
Nation, 

birth of concept, 91 

concept of the, 86, 134 

definition, 109 f., 133 f. 
Nationalism : 

African and Asian, 113 f., 117 

and authority, 127 

and colonial independence, 
109 ff. 

in Communist world, 110, 114 

English attitude to, 93 

Flemish, 119 

German, 129 f. 

inter- war, 115 

meaning of, 86, 93 

meaning in Europe, 124 

Middle Eastern, 125 

moral neutrality of, 136 

in Near East, 103 f. 

peasant, 124 

popular, 107 

postulates of, 96 

as principle of integration, 111, 
114 

pros and cons of, 104 ff. 

purposes of, 126 

rehabilitation of, 11 f., 85 ff. 

revolutionary, 101 ff. 

Soviet attitude to, 120 f. 
Nature, observation of, 152 



205 



Index 



Nazism, 186 

and Marxism, differences, 188 
and rnillenarianism, 5, 52 
and 'moral inversion', 45 
and nationalism, 1 10 
reasons of rise to power, 63 

Nechayev, 28, 38, 40, 42, 43, 189 

New England, 95 

New Left Review, 8 

Newton, 19 

Nietzsche, 19,28, 38,40,45, 191, 192 

Nihilism, 41 
idealization of, 28 
as moral excess, 17 ff. 
in Russia, 43 

Ottoman Empire, 101 ff. 

Pakistan, 89 
Palestine, 106 
pan-Slavism, 98 
* Party, the 5 , function of, 42 
Passion, moral, 17 f., 50 f. 
Pasternak, 31, 34 
Patriotism, and nationalism, 126 f. 
Paul, St, 157, 178 
Perfection, and creativeness, 173 
Petofi society, 32 
Philippines, 132f. 
Philosophical ideas, 
and conduct, 64 
influence on history, 59 
Pisarev, 43 
Plamenatz, J., 189 
Poland : 

Catholicism in, 98 
and Germany, 129 
and Ireland, contrast, 94 
nationalism in, 98 f., 124 f. 
revisionism in, 6 ff. 
rising of 1956, 1, 32, 97, 147 
see also Intelligentsia 
Popper, Karl, 9 
Populists, Hungarian, 72 
Portugal, 129 

Power, as ideological aim, 42 
Predictability, scientific, of change, 

3,46 
Progress, belief in, 166 



Proletariat, as Messiah, 41 
Propaganda, and psychology, 79 
Prophets : 

Hebrew, 18 

task of, 149 
Protestantism, 47 ff. 
Psychoanalysis, and health, 147 
Psychology : 

lessons of, 66 

and passions, 50 

Pushkin, 25, 27, 124 
Pushtunistan, 89 

Racialism, 122 

apocalyptic, 44 
Radicalism, 2, 35, 59 ff. 
Rakosi, 70, 72 
Rationalism : 

and irrationalism, 75 

variety of meaning, 64 
Reform, age of, 24 
Reformation, 47, 116, 122 
Religion ; 

as counterpoise to State, 151 f. 

and freedom, 145 ff. 

liberalism and, 34 

Polish revisionists and, 7 

secularization of, 5, 47 ff. 

technology and, 149 
Religious institutions, role of, 150 
Renaissance, 47 
Responsibility : 

increased sense of, 165 f. 

naturalism and, 132 f. 
Return of the repressed, 50 
Revisionism, 1, 33 f. 

and end of ideologies. 6 ff. 

Hungarian, 70 

Polish, 71 

Polish and Hungarian, 6 ff,, 72 f. 

Yugoslav, 73 

Revolution, total, ideology of, 26 
Rheinfelden Congress (1959), 4 
Rights of Man, Declaration of, 21, 

159 

Rimbaud, 182 
Robespierre, 26 f., 29, 39 



206 



Index 



Romanticism, 22 

and Nationalism, 30 

and National Socialism, 79 
Rosenberg, Alfred, 61 
Rousseau, J. J., 3, 5, 19 ff., 37, 46, 

64, 74, 9! f., 191 
Royal Society, 19 
Russell, Bertrand, 67 
Russia : 

causes of revolution, 62 f. 

decline of ideological dynamism 
in, 31 f. 

nihilism in, 43 

patriotism in, 1 14 

religion and moraity in, 49 

Sade, Marquis de, 29, 38, 40, 191 
Saint- Just, 26 
Saint-Simon, 5 
Salon and workshop, 173 
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 142, 147, 168 
Scandinavia, 48, 129, 135 
Schmitt, Karl, 46 
Schwarz-Bart, 174 
Science : 

and freedom, 166f. 

lessons of, 65 

natural and social, comparisons, 
166 f. 

and sociology, 27 
Secularism, positive value of, 151 
Secularization, 3, 46 

effects of, and morality, 47 IF. 

18th-century, 19 ff. 

intellectual, 24 
Security, social, 170 
Self: 

emancipation of, 151 

withdrawal of, 167f. 
Self-determination, 89, 115, 135 
Slovaks, 88 
Social Contract, 20 
Social engineering, 178 

piecemeal, 9 
Socrates, 180 
South Africa, 162f. 
Sovereignty, 76 
Soviet Central Asia, 121 



Soviet Union: 

erosion of ideology in, 53 f. 

future development, 8 

see also Russia 
Spain, 74, 129, 164 
Spencer, Herbert, 40 
Spengler, Oswald, 192 
Stalin, J., 28, 31, 38, 43, 55, 114 
State: 

and nation, 128 5 134 

religion as counterpose to, 151 f. 
Switzerland, 74, 90, 91, 115, 135 
Symbols, and human relation- 
ships, 168 

Taborites, 45 

Talmon, J. L., 5, 10, 26 f., 41, 46, 

163 

Technology, and religion, 149 
Theory and practice, in English 

politics, 25 

Thomas Aquinas, St, 146, 157 
Thorbecke, 77 
Thucydides, 22 
Tibet, rising in, 97 
Tito, 31, 55 
Titoism, 97 
Totalitarian ideas, reasons for 

power of, 186 
Totalitarianism : 

and disappearance of religion, 
163 

ideology of, 3, 41 f. 

nation-State and, 128 

and violence, 41 f. 
Toure, Sekou, 90 
Toynbee, Arnold, 64, 152 
Tradition, and nationalism, 90 
Transylvania, 88 
Trotsky, 63 

Truth, and religion, 157 
Tunisia, 107 
Turgenev, 27 f,, 43, 191 
Turkey, 9 

see also Ottoman Empire 

Ukraine, 124 
Ukrainians, 88 
Undeveloped countries, 55 



207 



Index 



United Nations, 110, 115 
United States, see America 

Utilitarianism, 27 

Versailles, Treaty of, 134 
Violence : 

ideological attitudes to, Com- 
munist and Nazi, 38 

Marx and, 39 

Messianic, as means and end, 26, 
41 f. 

passive, 75 

and scientific socialism, 28 f. 
Voigt, F. A., 41, 45 
Volonte generate, 46 



Voltaire, 9, 19, 20, 22, 34, 61, 64, 
74,78 

Wagner, R., 192 

War, Communist opposition to, 63 

Wazyk, Adam, 33 

Weber, Max, 9 

Wilson, Woodrow, 95, 187 

World War I, 6, 62 f., 88, llOf., 

128, 195 
Worsley, Peter, 18 n. 

Youth movement, German, 192 
Yugoslavia, 193 
revisionism in, 73 

Zhdanov, 54 



208 




CD; 



2:3 



130191